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All articles published to our website. This includes our workplace press, The Spark newspaper, and the Class Struggle magazine.en-usCopyright 2020 by The SparkMon, 01 Jun 2020 04:03:01 EDTTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturdayhttps://the-spark.net/np_1106101.html
https://the-spark.net/np_1106101.html“The system is broken”—the words of a young black man in Minneapolis watching flames destroy a police precinct demonstrators had torched.

Broken? Yes, it is! What else could you say about a system whose police for nine minutes casually knelt on a black man’s neck, watching until he stopped breathing—and then, just as casually, reported the man had died from a “medical incident”? If it hadn’t been for a bystander’s video, it would have been just one more lying police report, filed away in a dusty drawer.

George Floyd paid the price for this broken system with his life. He is not the first black person to pay that price in Minneapolis-St. Paul, only the most recent. Coming not so long before him, there was Thurman Blevins, and before him, Philando Castile and Jamar Clark.

And Minneapolis is not the only city to have a murder-by-cop exposed by video, a murder that otherwise would have been buried with the victim’s corpse. That’s why we know the names of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Brandon Webber, Antonio Smith, and Darrius Stewart in Memphis and Eric Garner in Staten Island, among so many others. It’s why we know the name of Ahmaud Arbery from Glynn County, Georgia, who was murdered by a former investigator for the sheriff’s department and local prosecutor.

No, it’s not just one barbaric beating, and not just one city. It’s the system, and it’s broken.

Born in slavery, this capitalist system, based on the exploitation of labor, is still marked by its beginnings. Almost from the moment the chains of slavery were torn apart in 1863, the once-enslaved black population was condemned to occupy the bottom ranks of “free labor”: driven onto chain gangs and prison labor working in Southern fields; pushed into sharecropping; later funneled into the reserve army of the unemployed by Northern capital.

In general, black labor still occupies that place, absorbing the worst unemployment in periods of crisis, temporarily filling the open slots in the ever shorter periods of expansion. This role for the black population was a creation of a capitalist system still carrying the marks of its birth in slavery. It’s what leads today to the greater rates of poverty among black people; it underlays the worse medical care and the worse school systems, worse levels of imprisonment.

This oppression explains the violence that systematically has been visited on the black population by those in authority. Officially sanctioned violence is what capitalism has used to keep the oppressed from revolting—all of the oppressed, black and white.

Yes, there are many white people, poor white people, killed by cop. White workers are also exploited. But white workers—including all the immigrant groups, one after the other, who have been funneled into the working class over time—have been given the petty privilege of their skin color, which means not quite so low a wage, slightly less poverty, slightly better access to education and medical care, etc. But slightly better doesn’t mean good. White workers may share their skin color with the capitalist class that sits on top of this society, but they do not share the wealth.

Every part of the working class has reason to revolt against this capitalist system that produces great wealth for those on top, creating growing poverty among those who do the work society needs. Today, this system is exposing us to untold thousands of deaths linked directly to the way it handled the virus. It is pulling us down the rabbit hole of its own economy in collapse. And it requires violence to maintain itself.

Now what? A somewhat older black woman in Minneapolis, looking at the burnt out police precinct, said this: “It’s like layer and layer and layer of gunpowder building over a long time and when you become an adult, it’s this stick of dynamite.”

This past week, in Minneapolis, the dynamite began to explode. And, as has happened so often before, young black people were leading the way.

There will be explosions. But beyond the explosions—if this time they are to produce the change the population needs—there needs to be a clear goal for the struggle. We must fight to get rid of the system that is broken, this capitalist system, which has created the oppression, exploitation and violence weighing more heavily on the black population, but still weighing on the whole working class. There need to be people standing for this goal among the oppressed who want to fight back.

Not too hard to figure out—it looks bad! And what time is it? Election time.

With over 41 million Americans having filed for unemployment benefits, he figures “Why repeat bad news?”

Trump repeatedly says that the economy will get better in the 3rd and 4th quarters of this year, and that 2021 “will be one of the best years we’ve ever had.”

But don’t try to take that to the bank. After all, the novel coronavirus didn’t disappear like a miracle, either.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106202.htmlA white cop from Ypsilanti Township, Michigan was caught on video beating a black woman, Sha’Teina Grady El. While the beating was taking place, two other cops tased and restrained her husband, Dan, to prevent him from stopping the beating.

The three cops claim they were there to investigate a shooting at the home next door to the Grady Els. As they arrive, the woman is standing in front of the neighbors’ fence and her husband is videotaping the cops. One of the cops grabs her husband, and another pushes her away. He can be seen picking her up and carrying her back into the video scene and punches her in the side. He then lifts his fist as high as possible and smashes it down into her head three times, at which point she attempts to slap him away.

The mainstream media have cropped most versions of the video posted on the internet to exclude the start of the incident. But there is no way Sha’Teina Grady El could have been biting the cop as he was lifting her entire body, throwing her against the fence and punching her in the side. It’s easy to see the cop is a large man with a boxer’s strength, and she’s a much smaller woman.

The local county Sheriff’s office claims the cop’s body camera audio shows him saying she is biting him.

They point out Sha’Teina Grady El, who is a nationalist militant, had two other incidents of resisting police. After her release from jail in Washtenaw county, police from Taylor, Michigan arrested her on an outstanding warrant, and she was taken to the Wayne County jail in Detroit.

Sha’Teina Grady El was beaten so badly, her face was bleeding. This is clearly a case of racist police brutality. These white cops, in a disproportionately black township, couldn’t accept that someone dare videotape them.

The Grady Els are Moorish nationalists who actively oppose the U.S. legal system. Given the history of racism, including police brutality which has recently been on full display, it’s certainly not hard to understand why they would do so.

The video rightfully prompted large protests in Washtenaw County including at the Sheriff’s office.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106203.htmlHundreds of independent corporate groups that produce oil and gas through fracking are expected to go bankrupt over the next year.

This is not simply because of the recent collapse in the energy market due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these companies had already been losing money for a long time. What kept them going, despite heavy losses, was an endless supply of cheap capital supplied by Wall Street.

Big financial companies created hundreds of billions of dollars in debt for these energy companies, thereby enriching oil company executives, not to speak of Wall Street financial companies.

These companies had “sub-primed” the production of American energy. The booming economies from North Dakota to West Texas and New Mexico from greatly increased oil and gas production thanks to fracking was created out of a great big financial bubble.

Over the years, as it became increasingly clear that it was only a matter of time before this bubble would burst, many sources of funding for this industry began to pull back. But the fracking companies stayed in business and even continued to expand because one big source of funding didn’t dry up: pension fund money.

With employers in both the public and private sectors all over the world cutting back on how much they fund workers’ retirement pensions, all pension funds worldwide have been desperate for higher rates of return in order to shore up their promises to retirees. So, they have increasingly resorted to hiring the same financial sharks and snakes, who created the oil and gas fracking bubble, to manage the workers’ money. The pension funds pay these financial “managers” a lot of money—a two percent annual fee—on all the funds under their management, no matter whether they make money or not.

With COVID-19, the money spigot to finance fracking companies has been turned off, and the entire industry bubble is bursting.

Nobody knows how much pension fund money has been sunk into this bursting bubble, money that has been drawn from the U.S. and all over the world.

But what is clear is that now that this bubble is bursting, millions of workers in the oil and gas industries are losing their jobs. Towns that boomed because of the increased oil and gas production are now turning into ghost towns. And pension funds are about to take a big hit, further endangering workers’ retirement pensions.

As for the fracking company executives and Wall Street financiers who have made a fortune—they won’t be the ones who have to pick up the pieces.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106204.htmlWhen rioting took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota over the murder of George Floyd, Trump jumped out on Twitter to quote an old, racist police chief from Miami from 1967 who had threatened, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Then Twitter tagged Trump’s tweet and deleted it, saying that it promoted violence.

So who is the thug, now? No doubt, when his handlers couldn’t control him, big capitalist conservatives had to remind him that shooting may start a riot, but often doesn’t end it.

Anyway, he had to roll his comments back and gave the lame explanation that he was just concerned about somebody getting hurt during looting and shooting (haha) and blah, blah, blah.

The only shooting he was doing as usual, was shooting off his mouth!

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106205.htmlOver the past month, the number of workers infected with COVID-19 in three of the biggest meat processors in the U.S.—Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods and JBS—has jumped from 3,000 to 17,000, according to the Washington Post. COVID-19-inflicted deaths of the workers surged from 17 to at least 66. This drastic infection rate increase happened after the U.S. government allowed reopening of more than half of the 30 meat processing plants that were shuttered because of the coronavirus.

After bringing these workers back to work, these companies claimed that they had taken extra steps to protect the workers by providing tests, masks, other protective equipment, and putting in partitions separating the workers, etc. But in reality, these are not nearly enough. The companies continue to maximize the line speeds. In one plant, the workers are forced to slaughter and process more than 30,000 pigs in a day. So, workers are crammed virtually shoulder-to-shoulder to tend production lines. Jobs like “gut snatchers” require people to work right next to each other, slicing open pigs and pulling out entrails.

Very short break time, totaling 60 minutes on every 11-hour shift, force the workers to eat together in crowded cafeterias and walk the same narrow hallways, making social distancing practically impossible. Some workers wear diapers on the line to avoid having to leave for a bathroom break.

The meat and poultry industry in the country is dominated by a few meat processing companies, including JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill Meat Solutions, and National Beef Packing. These very large companies process meat through a few very large plants. Roughly 40 of the largest plants supply about 90% of the pork, and a little more than 50 plants provide 98% of the beef in the US.

Much of the workforce is made up of immigrant workers, that is, the most vulnerable parts of the workforce. Many are refugees from all the continents of the world. They have few legal rights. And many live in fear that if they lose their job, they can be deported, or they could be separated from their families.

Over a century ago, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, described such horrible conditions in the meat packing plants that it caused a scandal. In the essentials, conditions haven’t changed. Profit is still the king of this jungle, produced by a workforce in a state of semi-slavery.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106401.htmlFrom the spring of 1918 through the spring of 1919 an influenza epidemic spread all over the world, bringing about the death of at least 50 million, perhaps 100 million. Combined with World War I, it revealed the barbarism to which capitalism had descended. But it also shines a light on the current situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic in a world still dominated by this barbaric social system.

World War I was a struggle among the main industrial powers to re-divide the world. It was the most terrible, bloody conflict known up until that time. Overturning many aspects of human life for a whole historic period, it laid bare the abject, criminal nature of the capitalist social order, and it provoked a powerful revolutionary wave that shook the world for several years, including first of all in Russia itself, devastated by the war.

The war was accompanied by the most destructive epidemic humanity had ever faced. Its frightening cost in human life, perhaps four times as great as that of the war, resulted in great measure from the way the capitalist economy itself was organized, from the imperialist looting of the world, and from the policy of the different states, serving the interests of their own capitalist class.

Wherever the virus that caused the flu originated, it is certain that the war considerably accelerated the flu’s spread into a pandemic, enormously increasing its devastation.

Preparing to Get into the “European War,” the U.S. Conceals an Epidemic

The first known appearance of this influenza came at the gigantic American army boot camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, in March 1918. As the troops who were infected moved, the flu moved with them, jumping to East Coast ports where the American “expeditionary” force for the “European war” was being staged.

By the end of May, half of all American troops had been infected. But American authorities denied there was an epidemic. The Secretary of Defense testified at the end of June that the troops had “never exhibited any signs of illness whatsoever.” The Wilson Administration had already confronted popular opposition when they announced their intention in 1917 to register men for the draft. To admit the existence of the flu in 1918 might have jeopardized U.S. plans to intervene in this war between the big imperialist powers for supremacy.

U.S. troops arrived in Brest, France, in June 1918, bringing with them the first wave of the flu that was to touch the European continent.

There are conflicting theories about where and how the virus itself originated. But wherever it was, the movement of troops, going into combat and returning from the front, is what spread the epidemic beyond the U.S. and Europe and into the African continent, into the Pacific, into Asia, and even into the Arctic, then finally back to the U.S.

Up until the armistice of 1918, military censorship prevented populations in all the contending powers from being warned about any illness, much less about an epidemic. And yet, by the autumn of 1918, half a million soldiers—French, British and American—had been taken out of combat by the flu. The flu spread across the trenches into the camps of Germany and its allies.

Having remained neutral in the conflict, Spain was the only power to admit the wide existence of the epidemic in the spring and summer of 1918. That’s why the flu was at first called, the “Spanish flu,” a name that has stuck ever since, even though it is completely wrong.

The Imperatives of War

To hide the reality of the spreading epidemic, the political leaders of the combatant powers violated every rule of hygiene known at the time. Schools, bars, restaurants, dance halls were left open—except when there were no longer enough people to run them. The “essential” enterprises providing material for the war were run by ever increasing numbers of sick workers, requisitioned by force to work.

People too sick to work in France were put on trains and sent to other parts of the country, thus spreading the virus more widely. The military bases, the military hospitals, the train stations, the factories, even the whorehouses set up by the armies for their troops, were the centers around which the epidemic clustered. Already in the Middle Ages, humanity knew it was necessary to isolate sick people. But isolating sick people would have required the various powers to admit that their troops were sick, and to devote some of the resources they had sequestered for the war to combat the flu. That, none of them were ready to do.

In other words, the needs of their war prevented the imperialist powers from employing any widespread measures that might have helped contain the spread of the flu. This was especially true in the autumn of 1918 when the war was drawing to its close, even as working people throughout the world were looking toward revolutionary Russia. The troops on both sides were fed up with the war.

The end of the war in November 1918 came at the end of the second wave of the epidemic. The celebrations that were organized to greet the announcement of the armistice were major sources for the rebounding of infection. The “victors”—Britain, France and the U.S.—would let nothing deprive them of their “victory” parades. There must be speeches and victory celebrations, flags unfurled, patriotism run amok.

In the U.S., the rapid spread of the flu among the civilian population, the so-called third wave, began with these patriotic, flag-waving extravaganzas, when tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands massed close together on city streets to greet the returning troops.

There had already been so-called “victory bond” parades in a number of American cities in September, which turned those cities into incubation spots for the virus. Philadelphia, with the biggest parade, was particularly hard hit. By contrast, cities like San Francisco and New York, which had already shut down schools and begun to prevent most public gatherings, as well as require the wearing of masks, were significantly more protected.

The Popular Classes Hit Hard

The situation of health in the countries at war, as well as in their colonies, had worsened considerably since the beginning of the war. On the one hand, the immense majority of nurses, doctors, pharmacists and surgeons had been sent into the battle zones. Hospitals had little medicine, not enough beds, and few means of disinfection. The sanitary situation in European cities was atrocious.

During these same war years, the civilian population had undergone a rapid fall in the standard of living. Workers in the factories were being driven harder and harder to get out more production for the war. In many areas of Europe where war raged, food was scarce. All of this meant that people were dying from other diseases, not only the flu itself.

The blockade imposed on Germany and Austria-Hungary by the U.S., Britain and France led to famine in the very center of Europe.

The U.S. was not as severely touched as those countries where people were living right in the midst of the war. But even here, poverty played its role in the extension of the flu. Working people crowded together in big-city housing were two or three times as likely as those in the wealthy areas to die of the flu.

The quacks who were selling snake oil profited greatly. And so did the major companies rapidly imposing their control over the marketing of medicines. Bayer turned itself into a giant company through its monopoly of the market for aspirin.

The Peoples under the Iron Heel of Imperialism

The pillage of raw materials and the severe exploitation of labor in the countries submitted to domination by the big imperialist powers rendered the consequences of the flu even more terrible for the peoples living there. The epidemic, which arrived through the ports, revealed the near absence of any medical personnel in these countries. There were hardly any hospitals. This was one of the consequences of the underdevelopment to which the domination of imperialism had plunged two-thirds of humanity.

Africa, under the colonial yoke, was forced to provide half a million men as cannon fodder for the European war and as hands to work in Europe’s factories. Africa suffered a rate of death from influenza at least twice as high as that of any European country. In Southern Rhodesia, under British domination, the rate of death was 9% for Europeans living in the country; 25% for Africans living in the “reserves,” and 92% among the African miners.

In the Philippines, under U.S. domination, U.S. troops who were infected were offloaded, disregarding the consequences for the population, without providing any medical supplies for them or the Philippine population.

India was the hardest hit of all the colonies, suffering at least 18 million deaths. The port of Bombay was first touched by the flu starting on the 29th of May 1919, when Indian troops, infected while serving in the British army, disembarked. Within two weeks, the city was devastated by the epidemic.

The colonial power refused to impose any quarantine on Indian ports, given the importance of Indian industry, particularly textiles, for the British economy. The colonial power paid no attention to sanitary conditions in the big cities, to which it had forced millions of peasants to move. Whatever doctors and nurses had existed before the war had been eaten up by the needs of the British war machine. India was left to battle the epidemic without any medical system.

Finally, it was the population itself that organized against the epidemic, pulled forward by militants who had begun to organize for independence. It was during this period that the Indian independence movement gained credit and extension.

More than Ever: Socialism or Barbarism

Certainly, the limits of scientific knowledge in 1918 played a big role in the rate of mortality during the 1918–19 influenza. The viral origin of the flu was not yet known. And there was no vaccine that might have offered protection from it.

But capitalism owns a crushing responsibility for the extension and deadly balance sheet of the epidemic. The imperatives of the imperialist war for the profit of big capital catastrophically drove down the standard of living and destroyed the health of populations in the countries at war. People driven into the cities were lodged under totally unsanitary conditions. No country had a policy devoted to hygiene and public health. Workers in the colonized countries were kept in an appalling material and cultural oppression.

What happened in 1918–19 should have condemned bourgeois society, bringing it to its end. It was saved by the treason of the principle leaders of the Social Democracy in 1914, which left the workers in most countries without perspectives and without leadership, both of which had existed in Russia when the proletariat overthrew the domination of the bourgeoisie there in 1917.

There is no comparison between the situation in 1918–19 and the scientific knowledge that exists today. And the material means to confront the COVID-19 epidemic are immeasurably greater than humanity had in 1918. And yet, today, there is also chaos. The number of deaths, given what could be done, is unthinkable. Today, the virus is wedded with an economic collapse, one which the virus may have provoked, but whose roots lie deep in the capitalist system itself. To get rid of the rottenness of this worn-out system means it has to be overthrown. This still remains the only viable perspective for humanity.

As the revolutionary Friedrich Engels wrote in Anti-D hring in 1878: “Both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established by it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.”

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106601.htmlThe following article was the editorial in SPARK workplace newsletters of May 25.

We are trapped by an epidemic, for which there is no cure and no preventative medicine, and we are trapped by an economy collapsing upon itself. This, we are told, will be our "new normal" for some indefinite time to come.

On the scale of the world, 330,000 people are reported to have died from COVID-19. This country, which leads the world in reported deaths, will hit 100,000 by the end of this month.

In the eight weeks since the U.S. economy began to collapse, 42 million people have filed claims for some kind of unemployment benefits.

Neither of these crises is natural, neither would be "normal" in a society organized around the needs of the population. And yet, here we are, with our "new normal."

The virus may be a newly discovered one, its details unknown before to medical science. But medical science already had predicted the appearance of such a virus, and warned of its possible evolution. Why was it "normal" for the political authorities and medical system not to prepare for it? Isn't it obvious? To prepare would have eaten into the steady accumulation of profit for a capitalist class bent on recovering the profit it had lost in the financial crisis of 2008 "09. Money from public health, like all public services, went straight into the capitalist purse.

When the virus appeared, public health authorities had no supplies, no organization, no preparation to meet it. The only answer the capitalist system had for a rapidly spreading virus was to shut down the economy.

Today, it has no answer to this economic collapse other than to send people back to work under conditions that guarantee new upsurges of COVID-19 in areas around the country.

In Missouri, a woman working in a newly opened beauty salon went to work for eight days, while suffering symptoms, but awaiting her turn to be tested and get results. She exposed 91 people, 84 clients and 7 co-workers. "Irresponsible," said Missouri's governor. Maybe, but what does it make him? He ordered the state to cut unemployment benefits for anyone who didn't go back to work. He presides over a system of public health that still doesn't have rapid testing for people who feel sick. He, himself, went out in public not wearing a mask, proudly calling attention to that fact.

Of course, it's only one anecdote. But it's indicative of the situation under which people are being sent back to work.

Calling people back to work won't overcome the collapse, not when people are still getting sick. But, more to the point, it won't overcome a collapse that had been prepared for by an economic system which steadily accumulates wealth in the hands of the biggest capitalists, driving down living standards of almost everyone else.

Out of work for two months, a significant number of people didn't pay rent or fell behind on their mortgage notes or car notes. They couldn't. The final blow was being out of work. But the real cause was the fact people's income doesn't keep up with basic costs like housing or cars.

Out of work for two months, one in four women reported they were short of food for their children every week. If that's so, it's because children had already been going hungry.

This is not normal, but it will go on being "the new normal" in capitalist society until the working class takes the future into its own hands.

The problem is not the capacity of the working class to stop this disaster. Based on its key spot in production, the working class can hold power "and use it to upend the capitalist class and its society.

Maybe it doesn't seem like it today. But that's a question of consciousness, of what the working class understands about its own capacities.

That depends on the small number of people today who understand this reality. Will they find the way to convey as widely as possible what is essential, which is that the working class needs to take power and use it? Will they create a nucleus that enables workers' struggles to take the path of revolution? Are they committed enough to the basic essential interests of their class to do it?

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106602.htmlAccording to their Teamsters local, at least 36 workers at a UPS facility in Tucson, Arizona tested positive for the virus and three of them are in intensive care. The company’s main concern was that the outbreak was delaying deliveries, so they brought in workers from out of state, exposing them to the virus as well. According to the union, both UPS and the Arizona Department of Public Health “refused to disclose the extent of the outbreak.”

That’s because both UPS and the government put profits first. It’s obvious: workers can rely only on ourselves and each other to protect our health and safety.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106603.htmlWhen governors started what they called “reopening” the state economies, certain sections of the population acted like the pandemic was over.

Of course, it is obvious that the capitalists have forced the economy to begin to open for a reason—their profits. But the working class, as badly as it needs money to survive, has to recognize that you have to be alive to work at all.

The mask issue, with some refusing to wear it, shows how individualistic people have been encouraged to be. “It is all about me” behavior. True, wearing a mask doesn’t protect you as much as it protects others BUT, of course, if others wear it, it protects you. A first responder said, “If you think you are tired of wearing a mask, try wearing a ventilator.”

Workers produce together all of the goods necessary for life. Try producing your own water supply, gas and electric, food...It is a myth that as individuals, we can just go it alone.

The problem with the virus is that while you may be tired of it, it is not tired of you. Ignoring our responsibilities to other people can only make it harder and more difficult to address.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106604.htmlA lack of access to quality medical care is a big reason black Chicagoans have been dying of COVID-19 at six times the rate of white Chicagoans. Many of the hospitals that served them were already in deep financial crisis before COVID-19. Four struggling South Side hospitals had announced a plan in January to try to survive: they requested state funding to merge and establish an integrated health system, replacing their outdated facilities and setting up community health centers.

Given all the lip-service the Democratic Party politicians who run Illinois have been giving to improving health care for under-served populations in this crisis, this project would seem like a no-brainer. But the state legislature didn’t even discuss it.

As a result, instead of the planned improvements, the heads of these hospitals said the lack of state funding “will force hospital closures, cause further service cuts and push access to care even further out of reach for the families we serve.”

There is money for hospitals in the bailout bills passed by the U.S. Congress, but it’s being gobbled up by already rich hospitals. Twenty of the richest hospital chains in the country got 5 billion dollars, even though they are sitting on 100 billion dollars in cash reserves.

In health care as in everything else, the deliberate choices of politicians in both parties reinforce this system that makes the rich get richer, and leaves the most vulnerable to die.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106605.htmlIn late April, Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California announced that it was imposing a 20-percent pay cut on its employees for 10 weeks. Stanford said it was because the number of surgeries and ER visits had gone down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so the hospital was making less money.

What Stanford did not say, however, is that it is also receiving $102 million in federal bailout money—more than any other hospital in California, and more than twice the amount the hospital is cutting from its workers’ pay—even though the hospital’s parent organization, Stanford University, has $708 million in cash reserves, and sits on an endowment worth about $28 billion.

To Stanford, like other big health care companies, health care is just a way to make as much profit as possible. And to that end, Stanford is trying to use the COVID-19 crisis to squeeze even more out of its work force.

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https://the-spark.net/np_1106801.htmlAfter torrential rain, a series of dam failures caused flash floods in a three-county area near the city of Midland, 140 miles northwest of Detroit. In this flood’s path were largely working class and poor communities. In a tribute to the power of working-class know-how, over 11,000 people evacuated on short notice, with no loss of life.

At least one nursing home and one retirement community had to be evacuated in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic!

As far back as 2004, it was found that the largest of the 3 failed dams, Edenville, would not have adequate spillway capacity to handle a major flood. Federal and state government reports were filed year after year—some warning of disaster—but nothing was done.

Flooding caused more than a half a billion dollars of damage to residents, many of whom were under-insured or not insured for flood damage.

The small, largely poor town of Sanford, Michigan was wiped off the map by this flood. Compare that to the two wealthy multi-millionaire cousins, Lee Mueller and Michel d’Avenas, who owned Edenville Dam, the largest and the first to fail. They were able to avoid paying the IRS $600,000 in taxes by purchasing 4 small-town hydroelectric dams 14 years ago.

These owners, and all previous owners, disobeyed federal government orders to increase and repair spillways to prevent floods. These guys were the third owners that had been told to fix the spillway by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and did nothing!

There are 2600 dams in Michigan and about 75% are privately owned. When these dams were first built, their hydropower generated big profits. Now, they are over 50 years old and need repair.

The nearby city of 40,000 that flooded, Midland, is near one of the U.S.’s largest toxic waste clean up sites. Many fear that Midland County’s 500-year flood may have destroyed past attempts to remove toxic dioxins from a superfund site there.

Midland is home to the corporate headquarters of Dow Chemical, a subsidiary of parent company Dow, Inc. Dow Chemical reported over 43 billion dollars in revenue in 2019.

According to one researcher, the national price tag to address all major dam problems across the U.S. is about $70 billion. This one corporate subsidiary, Dow Chemical of Midland, Michigan, reported more than 70 billion in revenue in 2 years. Certainly the money to repair infrastructure exists.

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, vowed to pursue “every potential legal recourse” against whoever was responsible for the failures. Is she ready to indict the whole system?

The words of one local observer describe the situation well: “I want to point out how weak and spineless the federal and state government’s reaction and directive to all this has been so far...Thousands of people have lost EVERYTHING... [the owners] should be prosecuted—Now!”

]]>Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400https://the-spark.net/np_1106802.html
https://the-spark.net/np_1106802.htmlSince the pandemic began, the Trump administration has shipped hundreds of children and teenagers into some of the most dangerous places in the world, often without notifying their parents. These migrants have been sent to Central America and Mexico without being allowed to apply for asylum, or talk to a social worker or anyone else who might represent their interests.

The Trump administration pretends that this is a move to protect the country in the midst of the pandemic. That is an obvious lie, since the disease is much more widespread in the U.S. than in any of the countries these children are coming from. In reality, Trump is brutalizing these children to prove he is tough on immigration—as if ten-year-old children are really the reason there aren’t enough jobs for people in this country!

Many of these children have disappeared, with relatives unable to find them. Many are likely to be killed, or raped, or kidnapped and forced into gangs.

In any reasonable society, someone who purposely put children in this kind of harm’s way would be arrested and jailed for a long time. But in this sick society, the child-abuser-in-chief is called “president.”

]]>Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400http://the-spark.net/bl_1590346080.html
http://the-spark.net/bl_1590346080.htmlWe are trapped by an epidemic, for which there is no cure and no preventative medicine, and we are trapped by an economy collapsing upon itself. This, we are told, will be our "new normal" for some indefinite time to come.

On the scale of the world, 330,000 people are reported to have died from COVID-19. This country, which leads the world in reported deaths, will hit 100,000 by the end of this month.

In the eight weeks since the U.S. economy began to collapse, 42 million people have filed claims for some kind of unemployment benefits.

Neither of these crises is natural, neither would be "normal" in a society organized around the needs of the population. And yet, here we are, with our "new normal."

The virus may be a newly discovered one, its details unknown before to medical science. But medical science already had predicted the appearance of such a virus, and warned of its possible evolution. Why was it "normal" for the political authorities and medical system not to prepare for it? Isn't it obvious? To prepare would have eaten into the steady accumulation of profit for a capitalist class bent on recovering the profit it had lost in the financial crisis of 2008 "09. Money from public health, like all public services, went straight into the capitalist purse.

When the virus appeared, public authorities had no supplies, no organization, no preparation to meet it. The only answer capitalism had to a rapidly spreading virus was to shut down its own economy.

Today, it has no answer to this economic collapse other than to send people back to work under conditions that guarantee new upsurges of COVID-19 in areas around the country.

In Missouri, a woman working in a newly opened beauty salon went to work for eight days, while suffering symptoms, but awaiting her turn to be tested and get results. She exposed 91 people, 84 clients and 7 co-workers. "Irresponsible," said Missouri's governor. Maybe, but what does it make him? He ordered the state to cut unemployment benefits for anyone who didn't go back to work. He presides over a system of public health that still doesn't have rapid testing for people who feel sick. He, himself, went out in public not wearing a mask, proudly calling attention to that fact.

Of course, it's only one anecdote. But it's indicative of the situation under which people are being sent back to work.

Calling people back to work won't overcome the collapse, not when people are still getting sick. But, more to the point, it won't overcome a collapse that had been prepared for by an economic system which steadily accumulates wealth in the hands of the biggest capitalists, driving down living standards of almost everyone else.

Out of work for two months, a significant number of people didn't pay rent or fell behind on their mortgage notes or car notes. They couldn't. The final blow was being out of work. But the real cause was the fact people's income doesn't keep up with basic costs like housing or cars.

Out of work for two months, one in four women reported they were short of food for their children every week. If that's so, it's because children had already been going hungry.

This is not normal, but it will go on being "the new normal" in capitalist society until the working class takes the future into its own hands.

The problem is not the capacity of the working class to stop this disaster. Based on its key spot in production, the working class can hold power—and use it to upend society.

Maybe it doesn't seem like it today. But that's a question of consciousness, of what the working class understands about its own capacities.

That depends on the small number of people today who understand this reality. Will they find the way to convey as widely as possible what is essential, which is that the working class needs to take power and use it? Will they create a nucleus that enable workers' struggles to take the path of revolution? Are they committed enough to the basic essential interests of their class to do it?

]]>Sun, 24 May 2020 14:48:00 -0400http://the-spark.net/bl_1589133271.html
http://the-spark.net/bl_1589133271.htmlTrump called on workers to be “warriors” for the economy. Risk going back to work, as 2,000 people continue to die every day from the virus.

Well, if Trump wants to be a “warrior”, let him. Let him risk dying. Let him give up being tested every day, as he is now, to protect his health.

But don’t let him dare call on us to go into work under conditions that guarantee more infections, and a steadily growing death toll.

We are in this mess because no public agency prepared for a new epidemic—despite the clear warnings given by SARS and MERS. No public agency put enough money into research so there would already be a vaccine that might prevent any disease provoked by the corona family of viruses. No county or state set aside funds so public health departments would be prepared to test and trace whenever a new disease appeared. Counties and states had other priorities—handing out money to corporations and other capitalists, propping up their profits.

As for the federal government, and its Federal Emergency Management Agency—even its name is a joke. The only thing it managed was lucrative cost-plus-big-profit contracts for private companies every time there was an emergency: flood, fire, hurricane, earthquake or disease. Forget about stocking basic protective equipment. FEMA didn’t do it. Even hospitals forgot about it. Too focused on making profit, directly or indirectly. And no medical insurance company even thought about stocking protective equipment; their aim was simply to make profit on the population’s ills.

The basic problem is not a new virus, it’s capitalist society, organized for the pursuit of profit, no matter what or who is harmed by that.

Today, the governors are beginning to open up the states, letting companies send us into work while nearly 2,000 people are still dying every day. All the governors are doing it in one way or another. The capitalist class they serve cries out for help in resuming their profit stream.

More of us are being called back to join those who never stopped working under unsafe conditions. Those who never stopped working show what will happen to the rest of us.

Meat-packing, for example, worked all through the shutdowns. Tens of thousands have already tested positive. Many dozens, if not hundreds, have died: not only the workers in these plants, but also their families, their neighbors, as well as people in the shops and cafes in the little towns where the plants are located.

Well, meat-packing is a factory. People work on lines, with too few bathroom facilities, with limited space in break areas. The whole set-up crowds workers on top of each other. Is this really different from factories any of us know?

Grocery stores also worked all through the shutdowns. Walmart, for example, had to close some of its stores, when they became centers of an outbreak, with hundreds infected, including people who shopped in the stores. How is Walmart different from the other retail stores and public venues that governors now talk about opening?

Caterpillar has a small factory in Illinois that never stopped working. Several workers died, more contracted the disease. Was it worth it? Caterpillar and its stockholders probably think so. Because on April 8, the company paid out 500 million dollars in dividends to its stockholders.

This is what it means for us to be “warriors” for Trump’s economy: to die by the thousands so the capitalist class can make millions.

We should be “warriors”, but not for Trump, not for any governor, not for the capitalist class. We should think about fighting, but for ourselves, for our families, for our neighborhoods—all those who make up our class, the working class.

Of course, we want to go to work, to have a job. But we also want to be safe. Our first job every day should be to organize our workplace so our safety is put first. Our last job should be to verify that we are all still healthy. We certainly can figure out how to do these things. Doing them, we will start being warriors of our class, the working class.

]]>Sun, 10 May 2020 13:54:31 -0400https://the-spark.net/csart1041.html
https://the-spark.net/csart1041.htmlThe appearance of a new virus and the pandemic it drives raise a new problem for scientists, as well as for all of society and for humanity. But human history is marked by this kind of problem. All living beings have interacted with each other since the beginning of time, and the multiple forms of viruses or bacteria "some beneficial, some noxious for the human body "are part of the world of life. Thus, the human community has experienced a multitude of epidemics, especially since the neolithic revolution.

People and Their Environment

Since the emergence of homo sapiens, human beings, an integral part of all living matter, have struggled to wrest their subsistence from nature. A simple predator at the time of the hunter-gatherers, humans eventually acquired a growing mastery over nature with the invention of agriculture, then built cities and created an increasingly complex division of social labor. By transforming nature through productive activity, humans transformed themselves. In this process, humanity developed.

Long before scientists pursued research that let them understand and clarify this evolution, the founders of the Marxist vision of the evolution of society had explained that the struggle of humans against nature to survive and gain their subsistence was, in the last resort, the basis of all human evolution.

In an unfinished manuscript entitled Dialectics of Nature (written for the most part in the 1870s), Friedrich Engels explained: "Only humans have managed to imprint their stamp on nature, not only by shifting plants and animals from one place to another, but also by transforming the aspect and the climate of their own habitat, even the plants and animals themselves. This has been done to such an extent that the consequences of their activity can only disappear with the general extinction of the earth."

In another part of the manuscript, Engels makes this significant comment: "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. Each of them, it is true, has in the first place the consequences on which we counted, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first."

We should note that at the time Engels wrote this text, science estimated that humans had existed for a few hundred thousand years. Over the last few years, scientific research has made it possible to extend this story from two million to some five, or even seven million years.

But looking only as far back as written history, which coincided with the invention of writing, itself linked to the neolithic revolution and the first great concentrations of humans into cities, we find that people have often been confronted by epidemics, from the plague to cholera, with consequences on the global economy. And this doesn't take into account the deadly epidemics let loose on indigenous peoples in Africa as well as the Americas by their conquerors, in some cases quite consciously.

The world's deadliest plague epidemic started in Central Asia, then spread along trade routes to China and India. Passing via Mediterranean shipping, it reached Europe around 1340 and spread across the continent. In the space of four years, it resulted in the death of more than a third of the European population. This weighed on the history of Europe, on its demographics and, consequently, on its productive forces. The Great Plague was so destructive, the population of France, which stood at around 20 million in 1340, did not return to the same level until more than 400 years later, a few decades before the revolution of 1789.

For centuries, humans have been confronted with catastrophes engendered by epidemics without understanding their causes. Frightened and powerless, humanity could only invent supernatural causes, invoking god and devil, descending into mysticism and repentance.

It was not until the end of the 19th century, when Pasteur and Koch began to reveal the role of microbes and the way they were transmitted, that science could begin to provide explanations based on the material world. Humanity's scientific mastery has increased considerably since then, today understanding, for example, that viruses and the diseases they cause can move from an animal that humans farm or hunt to human beings themselves.

No, We Are Not "All in This Together"!

Human beings are social animals, and they carry out the fight against epidemics within the framework of the social organization that exists when an epidemic occurs. The fight against the current epidemic is waged with the means of, and with the limits imposed by the current organization of society, that is to say, capitalism and the reign of the bourgeoisie. This fight "this "war against an invisible enemy," as Trump calls it "does not overcome the laws of capitalism, the laws of value and profit. It simply reveals them in a stark light. It does not suspend the class struggle, even if politicians try to conceal it.

Our newspaper and the editorials and articles of our workplace bulletins continue to denounce the many ways in which the government's management of the public health crisis is an attack on working people. We won't return to that here.

Nor will we speculate about what might happen if society were freed from bourgeois power, exploitation and the law of profit; how it might cope with a pandemic caused by a previously unknown virus.

Here, we want only to discuss the tasks imposed on revolutionary communist militants by the current situation, and the political and social clarification they must try to convey to workers, particularly to those who are the most politically conscious.

We have to start by rejecting the illusion pushed by Trump as well as Cuomo that "we are all in this together." We have to denounce how the government manages the crisis "and this means both bourgeois parties, at every level, federal, state and local; they all share responsibility for bourgeois policies, past and present, that infuse the current crisis. But it's not enough to criticize what the government does without fighting against the domination of the class that inspires this policy. People who do that obscure any real understanding of what is happening.

Militants have to express the anger emerging among people who today are making the economy and the society function, at great risk to their own personal and their family's health and lives "from medical personnel to garbage collectors, from factory workers to supermarket cashiers.

Revolutionary communists should take part in all the fights workers make to defend their lives by demanding sanitary measures and protective equipment. When militants are in a position to do so, they should try to push such struggles forward.

Most workers "even those usually not interested in politics "are appalled that people are forced to continue work without protection against the Coronavirus. They can see the glaring contrast between the promises made by political servants of the bourgeoisie and the reality of dangerous shortages, starting with face masks, gloves and sanitizers. People who work in the medical field see how the medical system has been undermined by years of privatization, budget cuts, the drive for profitability, the stranglehold of finance, and staff reductions.

The words used by government officials who carry out a "war against the virus" are as lying as are the patriotic proclamations used by their predecessors to justify imperialist wars!

The discrepancy between official lies and the reality of the lives of all those who care for the sick, all those who produce and transport, has led to spontaneous reactions. Some demanded to go home; some took sick leave; others protested against being forced to produce and transport goods that aren't necessary; still others stopped working in areas where someone tested positive for the virus. But whatever workers did, they were expressing a generalized refusal to throw their lives away. Why should workers risk their lives because the government asks everyone to applaud their sacrifice?

A politically conscious worker must take part in these spontaneous actions expressing refusal and, if possible, encourage them. But he or she must also try to explain the social causes that produced the situation to their class sisters and brothers. A politically conscious worker cannot separate the daily fight to defend workers' immediate interests from the propaganda against and agitation for the overthrow of capitalism.

It is, for example, necessary to oppose the production of non-essential goods, with the attendant risk on workers' health and sometimes their lives. We should denounce GM, Ford and FCA, which stopped their production, only to look for pretexts to restart it, simply to resume their revenue stream before their competitors do. We should denounce the continued production of luxury goods, or of consumer goods we can do without for a while, or, even worse, of military goods, the engines of war.

Those who believe capitalism is the only possible economy use the most blatant pretexts to defend the capitalists. They claim, for example, that continued production of spare truck parts is justified because they can be used for ambulances or for trucks transporting essential food products! They argue that factories producing cardboard boxes should stay open because the boxes can be used for packaging pharmaceutical products as well as socially useless articles. They claim a chemical factory is manufacturing packaging for plastic intubation tubes essential for resuscitation, ignoring that its packaging is used for many more "non-essential" products. They claim that an auto parts factory is being put back into service to produce face shields for hospital workers "which may well be stored for when the industry tries to force its own workers back on the job to produce "non-essential" vehicles.

All these people look for ways to justify what is basically only the pursuit of profit. It is artificial to separate out the different aspects of the economy's functioning. The economy is a whole.

While denouncing all this, we must not remain preoccupied by the difference between what is necessary, what is not really necessary, and what is harmful. In the end, this distinction depends on who decides what is necessary. So long as the bourgeoisie and its political servants are the ones who decide, stockholder profit will be considered economically necessary, while a decent income for the wage-earners who produce these profits will be unnecessary!

Transform the Class Relations

The problem is to know who controls the economy. Will it be the exploiting minority, the bourgeoisie, which dominates the economy as a whole and makes these decisions, or the exploited majority? In a period of a revolutionary upsurge, this idea can be summed up by the transitional objective of workers' control over production.

It is possible to force the bourgeoisie to take measures beneficial for the workers when there is a favorable balance of forces. But if we demand that the bourgeoisie run the economy to serve the interests of the exploited majority "worse, if we complain when it doesn't "we might as well demand that a billy goat should produce milk.

The distinction between what is necessary and what is superfluous or harmful makes sense only on the basis of class interests. The capitalist economy, which even in ordinary times is unable to feed and adequately house the majority of the population of this planet, wastes a colossal part of the productive forces, manufacturing planes and bombs to prevent starving people from revolting.

If we want to put an end to all this, political power must be taken away from the bourgeoisie and class relations transformed from top to bottom. The current "war" is being waged not only against the Coronavirus. The ruling class is waging it above all against the working class and more generally against everyone who contests the domination of private interests over the collective interest, which is to say, the domination of capitalism.

"Them or us" "this is the fundamental question in this time of epidemic, just as it was before and will be afterwards.

In a period when a large part of the population is asking questions, our primary task is to give them answers as Marxists, as revolutionaries.

Today, our lives are constrained by public stay-at-home orders and by the risk of contracting the Coronavirus. Confinement obviously has drawbacks for militant activity on the ground, but it doesn't suppress it, although it may force us to change some of the ways we carry it out. There are a multitude of ways, including today's technical ones, to remain in touch, to help each other and to tighten collective ties.

Confinement also has an advantage: it offers time for cultivation, education, and becoming more familiar with revolutionary communist ideas. In the past, exile or prison has often been an opportunity for worker activists to read and complete their culture and training. And the conditions of confinement due to the Coronavirus are certainly more bearable than banishment. The desire to gain culture has always been a way for worker militants to free themselves from the consequences of daily exploitation. Confinement is an opportunity to do this, including collectively.

During confinement militants can acquire additional weapons to continue the fight, and we can reinforce our human links, letting us make our work more effective once the epidemic has been brought under control. When that happens, the economic crisis that engulfs the capitalist system will remain. This crisis threatens to be as serious for the exploited as the Coronavirus, even much worse. The capitalist class will seek to make the exploited pay for the means it will use to try to overcome its crisis. The age-old struggle for social revolution continues.

In the text quoted above, Engels sums up, in the light of historical materialism, his vision of evolution that led from earlier species to human beings. He also discusses his vision of future necessity:

"In the most advanced industrial countries, we have tamed the forces of nature and pressed them to serve humans; we have thereby multiplied production endlessly, so that today a child produces more than a hundred adults did before. And what is the consequence? Ever-growing overwork and increasing poverty of the masses, and a great collapse every ten years. Darwin did not know what a bitter satire of humanity he wrote "and especially of his countrymen "when he demonstrated that free competition, the struggle for existence, celebrated by economists as the highest conquest in history, is the normal state of the animal kingdom. Only a conscious organization of social production, in which production and distribution are carried out in a planned way, can raise humans above the rest of the animal world, from the social point of view, in the same way as production in general has raised them as a species. Historical evolution makes such an organization day by day more essential, but also day by day more feasible. From its establishment will date a new epoch of history, in which humans themselves, and with them, all the branches of their activity, in particular the natural sciences, will know a progress which will throw in the deepest shadow all that will have preceded it."

Engels' text bears the mark of the time period when it was written. But the future it evokes is still the ultimate goal of those who take their stand on the basis of revolutionary communism.

]]>Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400https://the-spark.net/csart1042.html
https://the-spark.net/csart1042.htmlThis report was written in early February and was circulated among the militants of the Spark organization for discussion starting on March 1, 2020. We made no attempt to update the report, leaving it as it appeared on March 1, because it shows the situation as it was just before the widespread dispersion of COVID-19 in the U.S. The situation discussed in this report may have been bypassed by rapid-moving events, but this text is an important reminder that the groundwork for the current disaster hitting the working class had already been laid before the first person had been infected in this country.

An Unremitting Attack on the Ordinary Population

We have been living through what is being called the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Longest it may be, but it also has the slowest rate of growth of any expansion in history. This eleven-year period of near stagnation is simply another mark of the underlying economic crisis, which may change its outward characteristics, but doesn't go away.

During this latest period, the capitalist class has increased its share of the national wealth by carrying out a sustained, overt and ferocious attack on the standard of living of the ordinary population. There is a growing mass of the unemployed, as many as seven million more than before the last recession "despite a near-record-low official unemployment rate, which in fact ignores many of those without work. Millions who lost their jobs during the last recession never found work again. In semi-rural, economically depressed regions, workers have been confronting chronically high unemployment, a situation that the black population in the poorest areas of many cities has known well for a very long time. Factories and workplaces were moved from one location to another, or simply eliminated, decimating entire communities and regions. Productivity increases swelled the ranks of the jobless while overworking those still employed. Tens of millions of relatively decent paying full-time jobs with benefits were replaced by jobs that are unstable, often without fixed hours, often with short hours, much lower wages, and fewer or no benefits.

Many young workers are excluded from formal employment of any kind, pushing them into the underground economy "forced into odd jobs paid under the table, or else become lumpenized. And the situation doesn't get better as workers get older. Almost half of workers in their prime working years (25 to 54 years) and with a high school diploma are no longer in the labor force (as reported by Princeton economist Anne Case). At the other end of the age spectrum, an increasing part of the elderly cannot afford to retire "they have little in the way of pensions, other retirement benefits and savings "while others have been forced out of retirement back into the labor force. In fact, the elderly are now the fastest growing part of the U.S. workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers age 65 to 74 is expected to increase by 55% between 2014 and 2024. By 2024, 13 million people age 65 and older will still be working.

Workers are earning less, on average, than their counterparts were in the 1970s. The federal minimum wage today is worth almost a third less than it was at its highpoint in 1968, even according to government statistics, which wildly understate the impact of inflation today. The biggest part of the working class is living paycheck to paycheck, with total savings of less than $400, not enough to cover "relatively small, unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or replacing a broken appliance," according to the Federal Reserve in its annual survey.

Facing the steady reduction in their standard of living, more workers went further into a dangerous debt with high interest credit cards, longer-term auto loans, refinanced home mortgages and student loans. Consumer debt is now at higher levels than it was 12 years ago, above the previous peak in 2008, on the eve of the last financial crash. Working families' debt payments are eating up a growing share of their shrinking household income.

The state apparatus made severe cuts in the public sector, in order to direct more state resources to capital. The result was a further reduction in the standard of living of working people, as well as a worsening of their living conditions. Public funding was cut for the construction and repair of vital infrastructure "including water and sewer systems, roads, bridges, tunnels and mass transit. Not only did this reduce job possibilities, it also weighed on daily life "whether in the form of unclean water, unsafe roads or longer commute times to go to work. The slashing of various kinds of income support for the disabled and "working poor" reduced painfully the standard of living of the poorest layers of the working class. The cuts in Medicare and Medicaid mean that a greater share of medical costs are borne by those depending on these programs, in much the same way that cuts in benefits contained in union contracts have pushed more cost-sharing onto covered workers. The price for medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act continues to go up. The reduction of funds to education meant not only a lessening of the possibility for education and the support services, such as school nurses that were once part of public schools, it also meant that parents had to find the money to pay for sports activities, other extracurricular activities, and even supplies for classes "all of which served to reduce the available income in ordinary households with children.

The economic and social gangrene, along with the lack of medical care and social services, has spawned an epidemic of "deaths of despair" from drug overdoses, liver disease and suicides. Such deaths mounted so rapidly that life expectancy declined three years in a row in this country, before a slight uptick in 2019. Such a reversal in life expectancy has not been seen in this country since 1918, in the period right after World War I when the Great Influenza Epidemic spread widely through the population. No other developed country has seen a multi-year drop in life expectancy outside of wartime.

These are the human costs of what the capitalist class has done to improve its own situation in the midst of an economy lodged in crisis and stagnation. Corporations have taken a greater and greater share out of what has been produced and created, shunting it into profits, which reached record highs in 2018, not just in real dollars but in their share of the overall economy as measured by the GDP. Profits were not invested back into the production of goods and services, but funneled very directly to the bourgeois class that sits at the top of the income ladder.

Trump's Compact, Organized, Minority Base

Since 2017, political life in the U.S. has been dominated by the White House, in a way not seen since the presidency of FDR. Donald Trump sets the terms of political discussion with a daily intensity that most of us have never seen before, through social media posts, comments to the regular media and speeches at his rallies. Dominating the political scene, he reinvigorates the racism, nativism and misogyny that runs through this society. None of this started with Trump. And it's not only in the United States where such poisonous ideas are spewed by public officials. But coming from the mouth of the American president, they have a special weight. In the world, Trump reinforces the more generalized move to the far right. In this country, he gives official authorization to the racists who have always lurked in the social fabric.

At one point, media like the New York Times or Washington Post believed (or hoped) that impeachment would at least weaken Trump, if not remove him. It's not what happened. Some parts of the state apparatus may be upset by his unpredictable and self-serving behavior, which sometimes appears to undermine or upend their own policy goals. But Trump's policies still very much serve the bourgeoisie's interests and they still fall right in line with the policies of his predecessors "whether corporate tax cuts or a trade war aimed at containing and profiting more from its Chinese competitors or the strangling of regimes like those in Iran and Venezuela. Moreover, Trump's behavior serves to divert attention away from the attacks that the bourgeoisie and the state apparatus are carrying out against the working population. It even allows parts of the repressive state apparatus, like the FBI and CIA, to be presented by liberals and progressives as champions of liberty and freedom because some of them oppose Trump.

With no clear and organized opposition from a significant part of the bourgeoisie, the Republican Party had no reason to oppose Trump in the impeachment proceedings. And Republican incumbents risked political suicide by doing so. Before they get to the November elections, Republican politicians first have to run in the Republican primary, which is dominated today by Christian fundamentalists, other anti-abortion organizations, the NRA and a range of reactionary organizations. A Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in the impeachment trial could face likely defeat in the Republican primary.

Trump seemed to come through the impeachment "trial" strengthened. He kept his solid and distinct base of support, even if it is a minority. And, if we can gauge by the immediate post-impeachment polls, he seems to have gained somewhat more support in the general population "if for no other reason than impeachment failed. By the same measure, it appears that the Democrats lost as the result of impeachment, at least temporarily.

The most solid part of Trump's base comes from that part of the Republican electorate which was especially cultivated by George H. W. Bush. In the 1980s, Republicans sought to build a more popular base for themselves, beyond the wealthy part of the population that had long supported them. They found a ready-made base among the organized Christian fundamentalists, who flooded into the Republican Party after it acted to reduce access to abortion, and also opposed the increasingly general acceptance of homosexuality. In many ways, the Christian fundamentalists are similar to the base of reactionary religious movements that have emerged around the world: staunchly right wing, often xenophobic, sometimes racist, and generally opposing women's rights. And while the fundamentalist churches are centered mainly among white people living in rural or semi-rural areas, small towns and far-flung suburbs, we shouldn't forget that among these religious fundamentalists there are also important black congregations, as well as Latino Pentecostals, not to mention important dioceses of the Roman Catholic church. Trump didn't create this base, he inherited it from the Republican Party. But he made it his own by quickly expressing opposition to abortion and by appointing Supreme Court Justices whose opposition to Roe v Wade was clear. And with the 2020 election now looming, he did what no other Republican president had ever dared to do: he spoke at the annual rally of anti-abortion activists held on the anniversary of Roe v Wade.

The other part of Trump's base "or at least of those who supported him in the 2016 elections "is centered among working people, especially, but not only, white workers. (Obviously, many of the workers who support Trump are Christian fundamentalists "but not all.) Like Reagan before him, Trump made a special attempt to appear as their spokesman. But Trump went further than Reagan, offering supposedly "radical" policies in answer to their anger about the chronically depressed economic conditions, which have become more severe since the time Reagan was in office. Specifically, he focused on immigration and "unfair trade" as the cause of lost jobs and growing poverty. Again, this reactionary answer didn't start with Trump, but Trump has made these two issues the apparent cornerstone of his domestic policy.

It's important to recognize that many white workers in 2016 were angry and bitter against both of the two parties, Republican and Democratic. Many who supported Trump in 2016 did so on the assumption that he was an outsider, with the hope that an outsider would shake up the system. The fact that he has been under attack since the first day he took office has only confirmed their worst suspicions about the political system and reinforces Trump "giving him an excuse for not being able to address the problems people face.

Trump's total base is a minority of the voting population "organized and compact, but only a minority nonetheless. What gives Trump his prospects is the congenital inability of the Democratic Party to propose and act on a policy in favor of working people.

The Democratic Party's Shifting Base

For decades, the black population has been the Democratic Party's most reliable election base. More than 90% of black people who vote support Democratic candidates. The Latino population is comparable, although its support for Democrats is somewhat less, running between 55% and 75%. The very large majority of these two parts of the population are workers, and along with white workers, who still provide the bulk of the vote for the Democrats, they give the Democratic Party the backing of the majority of the population. Finally, the labor movement, along with the black churches, has provided the most dependable troops for campaign work leading up to and on election day itself, mobilizing forces to get out the vote.

The Democratic Party depends on this large, solid social base; but it has long acted as though these votes are locked up, that it's not necessary for the Democrats to do any more than pay lip service to the concerns of the working class population, black, white and Latino. And, to look at reality, what other choice exists for black and Latino workers, given the implicit and often overt racism of the Republican Party? What choice for workers, given that the Republican Party has long been considered the wealthy man's party? But there is another reality, there is a third choice, which a large part, sometimes the majority, of working people have opted for, and that is to sit out an election, particularly true for the black population, and especially its poorest layers.

This time, the Democratic Party made an effort to show it no longer was taking black and Latino votes for granted. The Democratic primary season kicked off in mid-2019 with the announcement of 24 different candidates for president: including four black, one Latino, one Asian, six women, one gay man and several younger candidates. The 2020 Democratic primary line-up was supposed to make a statement about the party's commitment to inclusion and "diversity" "in contrast to Trump. In the debates, one candidate after another sought to emphasize their "humble beginnings," their ability to understand what working people are going through today.

Eight months later, after ten debates and four primaries/caucuses, this pitiful pretense at "diversity" is unmasked for what it was. Long before the first primary, the black candidates had all been forced to drop out, unable to raise the necessary money; the same was true for the Latino and Asian candidates, and for all but two of the women. [And after "Super Tuesday," the field effectively had been reduced to two old white men, Biden and Sanders.] Certainly, the whiteness of the final lineup is not the basic political issue. But it is a concrete fact, whose symbolism may impact those who will vote in November "or decide not to vote.

In the 2018 mid-term elections, the Democratic Party directed a great deal of its campaign toward suburban women, students and even some better-off sectors of the population, people shocked by Trump's language and behavior. Obviously, by far the biggest share of the Democratic electorate was in and around the working class districts of the big metropolitan areas, black, Latino and white. But the Democrats flipped 41 Congressional districts, previously held by Republicans, which, when added to their 194 safe Democratic districts, gave them control of the House of Representatives. Enough middle class people living in the further out suburbs, most of whom ordinarily vote Republican, crossed over in 2018, allowing Democratic candidates to win "not only for Congress, but for governor and other state posts. The vast majority of the candidates who "flipped" Republican districts campaigned as so-called "moderates" "i.e., socially conservative. Many who ran for Congress were former military, CIA, or other intelligence agency professionals, and they leaned heavily on their backgrounds in their campaigns. None of them were endorsed by the so-called "progressive" PACS.

It's with these areas in mind that the Democratic Party apparatus focused on which candidate could be the "most electable."

This defined the attitude of the party apparatus toward Bernie Sanders. Despite his results in the first primaries, the money he raised from millions of contributors, and even his standing in the polls, Sanders was, according to them, "too radical" to win in November "a "socialist" on top of everything else. A large part of the party apparatus panicked that Sanders at the head of the ballot would cost their "moderate" candidates the election in many states.

Sanders made the argument, much like Trump did before him, that because he's not bound by the usual constraints of the political system, he will energize new voters. (In fact, Trump didn't energize new voters; he shifted a relative few white voters in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin from the Democratic column over to the Republican one "while more black voters, not liking either choice, stayed home. Some of Trump's voters in November had been Sanders' voters in the 2016 primaries. This was noticeable, for example, in Michigan.)

The fact is, Sanders did not bring more people to the polls to support him in the first four primaries/caucuses. To the extent there was an increase in turnout, it seemed to have been in support of the "moderate" candidates, even in the states Sanders won. Sanders own campaign was forced to admit that the "new electorate" he talked about did not show up "and that sealed the issue as far as the Democratic Party apparatus was concerned.

In any case, the real issue, whether it's Sanders or Biden or another candidate, is that the Democratic Party does not offer the population an answer to the current disastrous situation.

Sanders may seem to offer a more "radical" approach. And he certainly touched on some of the problems confronting working people. Among other things, he spoke of homelessness, and student debt, and low wages; he denounces the wealthy for not paying their "fair share" of taxes (whatever "fair" can mean in the midst of a completely unfair society). He may recognize many of the problems, but his answer to them, finally, is no different than the one given by all the other candidates, Trump included: that is, vote, put him in office, and expect that he will deal with the problems.

Deal with them, but how? Sanders has sponsored a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour "over five years time! A not very radical proposal, given that $15 an hour probably won't keep a family of four from sinking below the poverty line five years from now. At the end of the debate in South Carolina, Sanders said that the most important thing about him is that he is NOT radical, his proposals are NOT radical. That's true.

Sanders is known, most of all, for proposing "Medicare for All," which he says he would work to pass once in office. Medicare itself isn't adequate to pay the costs most people face. But leave that aside. To have a single system guaranteeing full medical coverage to everyone means that the hold of finance, of big capital, over medical insurance must be uprooted. That will not be done by explaining to the financial system that such a system will be more efficient, less costly "if less profitable! It could be done only by a massive mobilization of the working class to expropriate the capitalists who today strangle the medical system; it could be done only if the working class were organized to fight in its own interest, that is, to fight to expropriate the capitalists who today strangle the whole economy, and not simply to back the program of a politician occupying the White House. Such a fight means a bitter clash between classes. But that's exactly what Sanders has never proposed.

Sanders is, in fact, one of those candidates the Democratic Party often includes "someone with a "radical" tinge to their pronouncements, someone like Shirley Chisholm, Eugene McCarthy, Jesse Jackson or Howard Dean, someone who never wins the nomination, but does well enough to reinforce the idea that someday the Democratic Party might be transformed. Someday!

What will it mean if Trump were to win? It certainly could mean an aggravation of the racist, nativist, anti-labor and misogynist swill that spills from the White House today. And we could expect that the extreme right forces that have already been emboldened over the last number of years will be further encouraged, that racist violence will grow.

What will it mean if Sanders or Biden were elected? In the first place, it probably means there will be an increase in the popular electorate "either because there is a resurrection of the illusions that Obama elicited at the beginning, a resurrection of illusions in the electoral system, at the very moment that it has become vital that the working class break with illusions to organize its forces to fight for what is needed. Or, as more likely, it would be a product of popular fear and abhorrence of Trump. Voting for a Democrat on that basis is, in its own way, based on illusions in the electoral system.

Electing Biden or Sanders or any other Democrat doesn't mean the extreme right forces would disappear. Embittered by Trump's loss, they will be fertile ground for other reactionary demagogues. They easily can be pushed to violence, looking for someone on which to take out their frustrations. And they could be the troops of an anti-communist, anti-working-class, anti-union hysteria.

No matter who wins, the working class will be faced with the vital necessity to organize itself, including to defend its own troops and its own struggles from a growing physical menace. This is a necessity. And it's one that no Democrat is advocating.

Popular Mobilizations

There has been an oppositional current among young people, as well as the broader left, over the question of climate change, and also a certain one produced by the violence in the schools, tied in the popular mind with guns. It's clear that this opposition has already been pulled into support for the Democrats in the next election, even if at first through the medium of the Sanders campaign.

The reality of the destruction that capitalism is wreaking on the planet goes far beyond anything that can be impacted by hopping from one of the bourgeoisie's electoral horses to the other one. It starkly raises the problem of which class controls society. And this is not something that will be answered in the voting booth, but rather in the conscious struggles of the working class, based on its own class interests, to offer its solutions to the problems that the bourgeoisie has created for humanity.

Working Class Mobilization

Once again, last year, the working class was for the most part quiet. There were several teachers' strikes, particularly in Los Angeles and Chicago. There was a kind of mobilization of the teachers and support from parents and the community. But these strikes were controlled from beginning to end by the union bureaucracy, which is tied to the Democratic Party, which controls the local and state governments, the same apparatuses that have been imposing systematic cuts to public education.

The most important struggle of the year was the six-week strike of auto workers against GM. Like the teachers' strikes in Los Angeles and Chicago, it was decided on and organized from the top. But there were several things that made this more than the usual strike at the end of a contract.

In one sense, we could say the strike was historic, since there had not been a company-wide strike in auto that lasted more than a day or two since 1976.

It's safe to say that most of the GM workers who were on strike had never been in a strike before. When the strike started, workers seemed unsure about what was happening. But as the strike went on, they seemed to become more determined to resist. And when the final vote on settlement was taken after 40 days, over 40% voted "No." The workers who voted NO were not only voting against a contract they didn't like, they knew they were voting to continue the strike.

We heard a common refrain coming from workers in the other Detroit auto companies: "Their fight is our fight." In Southeastern Michigan, workers from Ford, Chrysler and auto parts companies went out to the picket lines, often bringing food or money for the striking workers. Teachers, hospital workers and state and municipal workers also joined the picket lines. Certainly there were never large numbers of other workers coming out to the lines, but some did "and then went back in the workplaces to talk about it, and bring other people out. They didn't join the strike as such, since they came on their "free time." But coming out as they did was a testimony to the feelings of solidarity that a strike among an important group of workers can enlist.

The most notable thing about the strike, other than the fact that it happened, was the focus that many workers had: they wanted to reverse the changes that have turned the auto industry into a major employer of temporary workers and of so-called second- and third-tier workers "that is, hired to work on the same lines, doing the same work but getting significantly lower pay. The interesting thing was to talk to older workers on the picket lines who said they were soon going to retire, the strike wouldn't change anything for them, but it was wrong that young people could be hired at half the pay to do the same work, or could be forced to work without ever having any hope of a regular job.

In fact, this issue permeates the whole economy, and it won't be overcome by the workers at one company or even one industry, as important as auto still is. In exactly the same way, overcoming the decisions to close factories, lay off workers, which also permeates the whole economy, will require a fight that spreads far beyond the workers who originally start to fight over it. The GM strike, as much as it reverberated in the auto areas, did not extend beyond its origin at GM. But by raising the issue, by trying to address it, by forcing GM to bring the current temporary and two-tier workers up to standard pay, even if over several years, the GM strikers raised a banner for others to pick up.

Since the GM strike ended, there has been a real propaganda campaign in the news media arguing that workers lost more than they gained in the strike. Perhaps GM strikers could figure out the math for themselves, since even the $11,000 signing bonus permanent regular workers got gave them more back than what they lost over the 40 days of the strike. But less important than the monetary win/loss calculation were the feelings the strike invoked "that it might be possible to make a fight and not be crushed. This sentiment is what the anti-strike campaign has been aimed at undercutting.

The anti-strike campaign was directed at other workers, attempting to tamp down the excitement that some of them felt as the strike developed. It's a campaign that has continued, with many variations up to this day, including by calling in question the motives of the union leadership who called for the strike "effectively accusing them of calling and prolonging the strike in order to hide from the union members corruption that supposedly is rife in the union.

An Attack on Organized Labor "Part of the Overall Reactionary Push

At the end of 2019, the federal government publicly involved itself in the pursuit of two unions, a pursuit that, if carried out, threatens further to weaken a union movement already severely weakened.

On the West Coast, a federal jury ordered the ILWU to pay 94 million dollars to an employer, an amount that would have bankrupted the national ILWU many times over. The suit concerned job actions carried out by an ILWU local in Portland Oregon seven years earlier against job cuts; the pretext for the ruling came from a Labor Department lawyer who testified on behalf of the employer that the job actions constituted a "secondary boycott," something held illegal in federal labor law. The union immediately appealed both the verdict and the size of the fine. Whatever the judge involved in the case finally rules, the financial burden promises to restrain the ability of a significant union to carry out its ordinary daily activities "at least within the framework that the unions organize their activity today.

In Michigan, a federal prosecutor publicly announced, after a three-year investigation into corruption by maybe a dozen UAW officials, that the goal of the investigation was to put the whole 425,000 member UAW under government oversight.

Are these two cases coincidental? Perhaps. But coming as they do together at this time, they make a strong case that the unions, as weak as they are, as class-collaborationist as they are, still create too much discomfort for a capitalist class increasingly intent on imposing a much lower standard of living on working people, intent on imposing it at a much faster clip.

What happens remains to be seen, but we have nothing in common with those self-styled union oppositionists in the UAW who are ready to gamble that by accepting intervention by the government in the union, they will get a more "democratic" union, via a "one-man-one-vote" direct election for top officers of the UAW, to replace elections at a convention of elected delegates. It's a bet lost in advance. In the Teamsters, direct election of officers was the sop thrown to the oppositionists in the union to get their tacit support for government intervention. It should have surprised no one that the government contrived to use its "oversight" of the Teamsters, once established, to remove a union president who led an important strike. The purpose of government intervention in the unions is to block the organized activity of the workers themselves. As for one-man, one-vote, which exists today in the Teamsters, it produced a procedure every bit as bureaucratic and out of the hands of the membership as what had come before. The means by which James Hoffa Jr. took the presidency "based on very large sums of money raised by people who had long had positions in the Teamsters "stands as proof of that. But more to the point, the isolated mailing in of each individual's ballot has little to do with a functioning workers' democracy, which depends on the possibility for workers or their representatives to meet together, discuss, decide and then implement what is decided on.

The unions, as they are organized today, cannot function if they are deprived of money and of support by the state. Their militants, not to mention their leaders, depend on both. Money pays for full-time union officials, for staff, for grievance and arbitration, for lobbying of Congress in the pursuit of pro-union legislation "with what good effect we know. It pays for legal staff, legal pursuits and an occasional friendly congressperson or two. As for the state, it's the state that determines whether a union exists or not, whether a strike is legal or not, whether a union official is corrupt or not. The unions, as they are today, act so as to gain the forbearance of the state, pretending or perhaps even believing that it can be convinced to be neutral in the ongoing struggle between classes. But the state is nothing but the instrument for defending the interests of the capitalist class.

The organized labor movement is long past the time when several generations of workers through their own self-activity created the unions themselves. What is severely lacking today is not the knowledge of how to fight, what is lacking is what existed coming up to the point when the mass industrial unions were formed: generations of militants who were devoted to their class, and who had a vision of another society, a communist society. They may not have been able to give a full perspective to the workers with whom they tried to build organizations. But they put the interest of their class before their own self-interests.

A Retrograde, Reactionary Climate

Everything in the current situation pulls the working class backwards. The fact that the workers in general have been unable to defend themselves during this long period of retreat weighs on the confidence they can have in themselves as a class. The fact that one part of the working class is induced to see other parts of the same class as enemies saps the very idea that there is a single class with the same class interests. The everyday dominance of reactionary ideas "and first of all of the individualism, the every-man-for-himself, the dog-eat-dog conception of survival "has eaten away at the basic idea of solidarity, which is the underpinning of collective working class life.

The worsening economic crisis has been forcing and will continue to force the bourgeoisie to wage an ever more brutal class war against the working population, with the aid of its state apparatus. At what point the working class breaks out of its demoralization to take up the battle we have no way of knowing. We do know that there is an enormous amount of crap the working class will have to break through. But we also know that the working class, when it begins to move, can move much faster than anyone understands.

[Whatever happens, the reaction of the stock markets to the spread of Corona virus shows how brutally a situation can change. Ever since the "recovery" from 2008 began, the economy has been poised on the edge of a precipice. What would it take for it to fall off the cliff? What seemingly unrelated incident could push it? We don't know. But the spread of the Coronavirus into a couple important countries, in this world where economic activity is interwoven globally, might be what pulls the whole world into a new, more devastating collapse. The economic crisis then unleashed would almost certainly turn into a political crisis.]

In any case, our duty is to defend within the working class revolutionary communist ideas "ideas that have practically disappeared from the working class. We cannot act as though these ideas can be "snuck in," gradually "introduced" bit by bit. We need to put them forward simply and directly as the necessary answer to a society intent on the destruction of humanity. Our aim must be to find those who can be militants and fight to spread these ideas from inside the working class.

On September 26, 2019, a demonstration in Baghdad of thousands of unemployed young people demanding jobs turned into a huge mass movement calling for the downfall of the regime, just in the course of a few days. After the firing of Lieutenant General al-Saadi, who was popular for the role he played in the fight against the Islamic State organization, the repression carried out by the security forces against these young people, firing at them with live ammunition, set off an unprecedented revolt.

Since October 1, a movement of popular resistance has swept Iraq, spreading through social media and radiating out from Baghdad. It then spread to southern cities like Nasiriyah and Basra and to the large central cities like Najaf and Karbala, regions where the majority of the population belongs to the Shia denomination. The north of the country, which is mostly Kurdish, and the regions with a Sunni majority have kept their distance from the protests for the moment.

A Revolt against the Political System and against Iran

In the world's fourth-largest producer of oil, the demonstrators denounce the unemployment and the deterioration of public services that cause the population to suffer. They accuse the politicians of being responsible for the corruption that saps all levels of society and of having grabbed up the oil money. The slogan "We want work," has given way to slogans calling for politicians to resign, notably the Prime Minister Abdel Mahdi, whose arrival in power had stirred the hopes of many only one year before.

In order to hold back the protests, the government announced emergency measures, new elections, and a reform of the employment and retirement systems. But the demonstrators no longer believe in such promises. They reject the political system of religious power-sharing between the Shia, Kurdish, and Sunni elites, put in place after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 following the military intervention of the United States, with the complicity of Iran. "In the name of religion, the thieves robbed us!" the demonstrators chant. "We want a better country, without corruption, without the division of offices through sectarian quotas," one of them explained.

The government has tried in vain to use repression to put an end to a peaceful movement. The movement has expanded. Young people in working-class neighborhoods were joined by students from secondary schools, high schools, and universities. The unions called for a strike in all public services. Administrations and educational institutions remained closed for more than two months. Doctors and lawyers also joined the movement. During the first three months, the repression caused more than 450 deaths and 20,000 injuries. Braving the heavy weapons of the security forces and the bullets of the militias' snipers, young people continued to protest and to occupy Tahrir Square in Baghdad, as well as the central squares of other cities.

The speeches of the Iranian leaders, accusing the demonstrators of acting on behalf of foreign powers like the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, only fueled the protestors' national sentiment. Iraqis are in fact subjected to a double domination, by the U.S. and Iran, both of which they reject. In November, slogans hostile to Iran, like "We want a country," and "Iran, withdraw!" began to appear. On November 4, in Karbala, which Shia Muslims consider to be a holy city, protestors attacked the Iranian consulate, which they covered in Iraqi flags, writing on the walls: "Free Karbala, out with Iran." On November 27, the Iranian consulate in Najaf was set on fire.

The rejection of Iran, the sponsor of the Shia religious parties and militias which have dominated Iraq since 2003, is all the more alarming for the government given that young people in the Shia regions, which are supposed to be its social base, have risen up. Sadr City, the huge poor neighborhood of Baghdad and the former stronghold of the Communist Party, had become that of Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a powerful Shia nationalist and religious party. His stances made him popular among the disinherited social layers which he claims to represent.

At the time of the legislative elections of 2018, Moqtada al-Sadr rallied the Communist Party to him with a nationalist program calling for a secular state. He based his campaign on a reform of the state, an end to the militias, the struggle against corruption, social justice, and religious toleration. His victory in the elections made his movement the leading political force in Parliament. But as soon as he was elected, he allied himself with his rivals in the Fatah Alliance, a coalition of pro-Iranian militias, to form a compromise government.

In this respect, Moqtada al-Sadr is responsible for the policy carried out by the government. Faced with a spontaneous uprising beyond his control, in which many of his partisans took part, he played a double game, claiming at the beginning to understand the movement, mobilizing his militants to organize it and supposedly to protect it. Although many demonstrators saw this support as an encouragement, others remained suspicious and rightly saw it as a maneuver. And al-Sadr did in fact profit from the movement at first, using it to settle his scores with the Prime Minister, whom he called on to step down. This Prime Minister, Abdel Mahdi, finally announced his resignation on November 29 under popular pressure, although this did not put a stop to the protests.

After the Assassination of Soleimani

At the beginning of January, thousands of pro-Iranian militia members burst into the "Green Zone," heading in the direction of the U.S. embassy sheltered in this protected neighborhood. In response, President Trump ordered the assassination in Baghdad of General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, his right-hand man in Iraq. This U.S. provocation against Iran changed the game. Among other consequences, it caused the mask to drop away from Moqtada al-Sadr, since he immediately threw his support behind Iran.

On January 29, the demonstration of his supporters with slogans hostile to the United States was a true show of force. Al-Sadr accused the Iraqi protestors of playing the game of the U.S. and called on them to stop their movement. But the young people who had been in the streets for months did not obey his orders, refusing to have their revolt overtaken by the rivalries between powers and used by the United States.

The Iraqi Parliament, dominated by Shia parties, called for the departure of the 5,000 U.S. soldiers and their allies present in the country. In retaliation, Trump threatened the Iraqis with "sanctions like they've never seen before." After Soleimani's assassination, Iraq might have appeared to be the arena where the U.S. and Iran would clash and settle their scores. But in reality, Iraq has been the site of a tacit alliance between the two powers for the past 17 years. They have both backed a corrupt political regime based on religious sectarianism. In a certain sense, the war which they are waging today in Iraq is coming to the rescue of a weakened regime in crisis. The tension between these two sponsors allows the Iraqi government to make people forget the conditions under which it was established.

A Religious Regime Born out of U.S. Imperialist Intervention and Backed by Iran

We must go back to the origins of this U.S.-Iranian convergence of interests in Iraq, which seems unnatural at first glance. In 2003, two years after the September 11 attacks, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. They accused Saddam Hussein of being responsible for the attacks and of having weapons of mass destruction. This was the pretext for the military occupation of a devastated country, weakened by successive wars and a heavy embargo. The war waged by Iraq against Iran from 1980 to 1988 had been encouraged by U.S. imperialism, keen on undermining the regime of the ayatollahs which was hostile to it, in this oil-rich region. Next came the Gulf War in 1991, which was followed by 10 years of economic sanctions, causing the deaths of about a million people.

It was in the name of bringing peace and democracy that the United States rained down fire on Iraq in 2003. But the U.S. bombings and occupation only added another level to the country's destruction. The Iraqi army and civil administration were dismantled. The U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer, set in place a Constitution which pitted Iraqis against each other according to their religious or ethnic background. The Iraqi population is 60% Shia, 20% Sunni, and 20% Kurdish. The Sunnis were punished and marginalized for their supposed support for Saddam Hussein's regime. The occupation authorities relied on Shia political forces, whom they believed they had won over because of the persecution they had suffered under Saddam Hussein. Among these were Shia religious parties, such as the Dawa Party, which was supported by Iran.

The U.S. occupation created an explosive situation, resulting in a clash between communities. It promoted the emergence and growth of several jihadist militias drawing recruits from the Sunni population. The most violent of these, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, targeted the occupying army at first, before launching attacks against Shias. In retaliation, the Sunni population was targeted by the Shia militias, and chaos became generalized, plunging Iraq into an inter-religious war. The violence did not come from the Sunni or Shia populations, but rather from the militias who used terror to impose their authority.

In 2008, this war ended in the victory of the Shia militias supported by Iran and the United States. They took control of Baghdad and drove most of the Sunni population out of the capital. But terrorist attacks did not stop. In order to protect themselves, U.S. authorities carved out an enclave in Baghdad "the "Green Zone" "in the center of which they built the largest embassy in the world, and in which the Iraqi ruling classes also lived.

In 2011, the year of the "Arab Spring," U.S. president Obama decided to gradually withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. The balance sheet of U.S. occupation and wars was devastating. The destruction caused by U.S. bombardment had still not been repaired. Most of the country's water and electricity distribution system was out of commission. Iraq had been drained of its skilled professionals, many of whom, including doctors, teachers, and others, had fled the country.

The War against ISIS Reinforces the Militias

Al-Qaeda in Iraq seemed to have been defeated, but a new militia born within it, the organization of the Islamic State, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, grew as a result of the war in Syria. It flooded into Iraq, successfully taking Mosul, the second-largest city in the country, in June 2014. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claimed to be avenging the Sunni population and spoke of his ambition to build a caliphate on horseback in Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi Army, infested with corruption and incapable of combat, vanished into thin air.

Faced with the swift advance of the troops of the Islamic State as they threatened Baghdad, Obama mobilized his allies, including France, for a new military intervention. Iran, for its part, organized and mobilized Shia militias under the leadership of General Soleimani in order to fight the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria. Once again, the United States and Iran found themselves in an alliance to save a regime which they had backed and which preserved their respective interests.

In 2018, Trump officially announced a victory against the troops of the Islamic State and a scheduled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria and Iraq. But the war against Daesh left Iraq in a state of complete decay. The militias had taken on an unprecedented importance. After the horrors committed by the Shia militias during the war of 2006 "2008, their victory over Daesh restored legitimacy to them which they also drew from the Iraqi state, which granted them police powers over all the territories they had taken back from the jihadists.

The Militias, a State within the State

The militias came out of this war politically, financially, and numerically strengthened. Some 50 militias, grouped in an umbrella organization called the Popular Mobilization Forces, today command 150,000 men and control a budget of 2.2 billion dollars! All of them are more or less close to Iran, led by Hadi al-Amiri and before January by General Soleimani, and have considerable military means. They have tanks, helicopters, a general staff, and their own intelligence services. They are present all throughout the state apparatus, including the federal police. Intending to defend their interests and profit from their victory over Daesh, they managed to become integrated into the national forces in 2016, while preserving their autonomy from the Iraqi command.

The religious parties and the militias linked to them control the government at all levels, from the ministries to the local level, as well as Parliament. They use public funds for their own benefit and for a whole host of clients who depend on them. Their hold on Iraqi society increased corruption, which was already substantial. Every functionary post is for sale, from the highest minister to the lowest employee. At the economic level, the parties and armed groups control a growing portion of oil revenue. They also exercise a stranglehold over import networks due to their control of the customs offices. The population's resentment of these practices, which mix together the interests of Iran and the Iraqi political-military elites, is enormous.

In the region of Basra, which supplies 90% of the country's oil exports, the population is left to fend for itself. It suffers from the lack of infrastructure, water and electricity cutoffs, and the exhaustion and pollution of groundwater sources. Unemployment is massive, and the population accepts it even less because Iraqi workers are kept out of the jobs linked to the oil industry, which are reserved for foreign managers and an Asian workforce. This already led to a revolt in the summer of 2018, but the promises to establish quotas for jobs given to Iraqis have never been respected.

Economic Disaster and Social Inequalities

The international oil companies are pumping out Iraq's oil in conjunction with the Shia religious parties and their militias. These groups control the customs offices and maintain a grip on the ports and airports. They take their cut of every commercial transaction and every work contract. Through this type of corruption, billions of dollars have been swallowed up by a wealthy class that emerged from the clergy, the parties, and the militias, whose situation is very far from the extreme poverty of the population.

It is estimated that, since 2003, no less than 410 billion dollars have been extorted, or more than two times the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 2018. This official figure, widely known to Iraqis, feeds their anger and makes the country's economic collapse and the deterioration of living conditions intolerable.

While the GDP per capita was $7,000 in 1990, it fell to less than $4,990 in 2017. Iraq is a country where 60% of the population is less than 25 years old. The young people who started the movement came from the poor neighborhoods that surround the capital. Forty percent of them are unemployed. The students who joined them do not see a future for themselves. With diplomas in their pockets, they find only small jobs in the informal economy. All of these young people have known only hardship and war, and some of them have to provide for their families, after the departure or death of the father during the fighting that has bled Iraq since 2003.

These wars have also destroyed the country's industrial fabric, which included many factories and a large working class. Today, almost all goods consumed in Iraq are imported from China, Russia, and especially Iran, which considers Iraq to be a vital market for unloading its products. The many companies which Iran has implanted in Iraq are a way to get around the U.S. embargo.

The country's economy is dependent on oil, with more than 90% of its resources coming from the export of hydrocarbon. Between 2003 "2014, with the price of a barrel above $100, the government responded to unemployment by hiring in the public sector. In this country of more than 42 million people, one out of every two workers is employed by the state, or seven million people. But, with the fall in the price of oil since 2014, the government no longer has the same options available to it and has become heavily indebted.

The consequences for the population are disastrous. Public services have been abandoned. Medicines can no longer be found in the hospitals, of which there are not enough. Not all children have access to education. In certain classrooms, the students do not have chairs or tables to study. Thousands of establishments have been partially or entirely destroyed. The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that 7,500 more schools are needed to comfortably accommodate all children. Not having enough space, one third of Iraqi schools have to use up to three rotations to accommodate all of their students. Despite this, 130,000 children did not attend school this year.

What Perspectives?

It is a daily challenge for millions of Iraqis to get food, drinkable water, and a roof above their heads. With the announcement of Daesh's defeat and the return of a relative peace, the population's hopes for a free and dignified life have returned to the surface. They have mostly been expressed in the Shia regions, which have been far less affected by the fighting.

The inhabitants of the Kurdish and Sunni regions, sites of the war against Daesh, are still in a state of shock. In total, 1.8 million people had to flee their homes, and one third still live in the camps. The city of Mosul, which was liberated in 2017, has not yet recovered from the destruction. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have also fled into Iraq. Furthermore, fear remains present, since the defeat of Daesh does not mean that all of the jihadists disappeared, and their sleeper cells could reactivate at any moment. This may explain why these populations have remained to the side of the protests, even if they share the same revulsion against the regime based on religious division, corruption, and interference by foreign powers.

Five months after the start of the demonstrations, the movement continues, with the occupation of central squares, street protests, and blockades of universities and roads. The demonstrators now reject the new Prime Minister Mohammed Allawi, who had already been Prime Minister twice before. Despite the maneuvers by political parties and a repression which has killed more than 600 and wounded 25,000, the young people engaged in struggle are continuing to defy the government. They know that every demonstration and every blockade can end in bloodshed. Their leaders are tracked, hunted and threatened with death by security forces and by militias armed to the teeth.

After years marked by military interventions, foreign wars and civil wars, as well as periods of economic embargo, population displacements, bombings and massacres, Iraq is a devastated country. The economy, which was relatively developed until the 1980s, has experienced an enormous setback. The country's resources are being bled by political-mafia clans linked to neighboring powers or to imperialism. Iraqi young people are struggling against this situation with courage and with energy born out of desperation. On the basis of past experience, they no longer have confidence in the existing political forces, each of which has its share of responsibility for this catastrophe, and they rightly see a way out only through their own revolt.

In order to put an end to imperialism's domination over the Middle East, which takes shape in the multiplication of crises and wars, the regimes which divide up the region must be overthrown, along with the possessing classes who support them. Only a proletarian revolution on the scale of the region would make this possible. It is on this path that the Iraqi young people must learn how to lead their movement. There is no other real way out of the intolerable situation in which they live, just like the rest of the population and that of many neighboring countries, from Iran to Syria and Yemen, from Egypt to Lebanon, and from Libya to Sudan, where the situation has become just as unbearable.

]]>Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400https://the-spark.net/csart1044.html
https://the-spark.net/csart1044.htmlThe following article is a translation of one that appeared in Lutte de Classe (Class Struggle), issue #206, the magazine of Lutte Ouvri&egravere (Workers Struggle), the revolutionary communist workers organization active in France.

China's initiative, which it has called "the New Silk Road," referring to the past splendor of the Chinese Empire, has generated a lot of coverage. Supporters of the initiative view it as a true Marshall Plan, which would benefit not only China, but also the poor and less poor countries situated along these routes, "an attempt to create a Chinese-style globalization"; while its detractors see it as a form of neocolonialism or a new imperialism. The new Silk Road, like the trade war with the United States, pose once again the question of the relations between China and the rest of the world. Some people see China as an ally of the poor countries, helping in their development, while others consider it to be a growing imperial power, today the second greatest world power, tomorrow the first.

The reality is more complex. China, which was until the 18th century the leading global power, found itself in the 19th and early 20th centuries diminished, oppressed, invaded, and even broken into pieces under the blows of the West's and Japan's imperialist colonial policies. In 1949, nationalist leaders who called themselves communist, in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leaned on a powerful peasant revolt to successfully establish a strong centralized state, capable of confronting the economic and military assaults of imperialism. For a century, the country had not had such a state. But this state, due to its origins and perspectives, remained an instrument for the bourgeois development of the country. State control laid the economic foundations for the development which has taken place over the past 30 years, sheltered from the pressure of imperialism, on the backs of the peasantry and the working class. These foundations, the state itself, the big state enterprises extracting raw materials, producing energy, constructing dams, roads, and buildings, remain at the heart of the Chinese economy. Nevertheless, even while maintaining its dictatorial form and communist name, over time the state authorized and then promoted the accumulation of private capital. And it was the state apparatus itself which served as the intermediary between the imperialist bourgeoisie and China, allowing the country to reconnect with the global market without once again being carved up by imperialism. It is on this basis that the investments of private Western and Japanese companies have accelerated the development of Chinese capitalism since the end of the 1980s, giving it its particular characteristics.

The state thus has a double role. It defends the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie "of which the Central Committee of the CCP contains an important cross-section "including by protecting the interests of some of its members against imperialism. But the state is also the means for China's reintegration into the global economy, the door through which imperialism can enter, in some ways the base on which imperialism supports itself in China. A base which keeps a certain independence, but a base for imperialism all the same. The Chinese state set up free zones, creating legislation tailored to Western companies and their subcontractors, opening up the internal market to them. Incidentally, this shows that, in this world dominated by imperialism, the best that the underdeveloped countries can do for themselves, the best that the nationalist petty-bourgeoisie can do, is to create a state to defend its national interests. But, in the absence of a change in the global balance of forces, countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and China can only reintegrate into the imperialist economy. So long as the big imperialist bourgeoisie is not overthrown, it will end up swallowing everything. In China, it does this in collaboration with the resurgent national bourgeoisie. It is the state of this national bourgeoisie which has played the role of an intermediary between Western and Japanese capital on the one hand, and the Chinese workforce and market on the other. China's powerful and centralized state has prevented it from being trampled over like it was in the 19th and 20th centuries. But although it certainly recovers a part of the surplus value produced within its borders "the number of Chinese billionaires is proof of this "most of this is accumulated elsewhere, in the coffers of Western and Japanese corporations. China remains an underdeveloped country. Its state apparatus has never had the perspective of challenging the domination of U.S. imperialism. However, its size and population allow it to play its own game, and even to compete with other capitalist powers. But this takes place within the general framework established by imperialism, to which the profits ultimately fall.

A Headlong Rush toward the Future

In the 1990s and 2000s, China developed primarily as the "workshop of the world." The imperialist countries localized some of their production of goods in this country with its low-wage and seemingly inexhaustible workforce. One of the consequences was that the pace of China's development ended up following the convulsions of the global economy, particularly those of the top world power, the United States. After the crisis of 2008, when the global economy was far from reaching its previous rates of growth, the Chinese state limited the damage by injecting hundreds of billions of dollars "the media spoke of 500 billion dollars "into gigantic investments. This had a big impact in the real estate sector and allowed a certain number of bureaucrats to amass even greater fortunes. These investments flowed through not only the Chinese economy but also a large section of the global economy, on the hunt for markets and profits. The ghost cities mentioned by the media several years ago are a by-product of this period. It hardly mattered whether these investments were useful "production was needed to make up for the decline in exports to the West and to guarantee the profits and positions of the ruling elites. To avoid internal protest, the big state firms limited layoffs since those layoffs could have had unpredictable political consequences for the regime.

After the crisis of 2008, Chinese investment also kept alive the giant state enterprises, some of which became known as "zombie companies." As long as production capacities exist, either they require an outlet or must eventually be eliminated. And yet, according to the World Bank, unused production capacity has been particularly high since 2008, reaching around 10% of China's Gross National Product, after Western and Japanese companies cut contracts. To make up for the global economic slowdown, the Chinese authorities talked about developing the interior market. They said they wanted to convert tens of millions of Chinese proletarians and peasants into consumers of the products of their own workshops and factories. Today, these speeches have been cast aside "consumption requires wages to match it. But the relatively low wages of Chinese workers are one of the essential conditions for the development of the Chinese economy. This is incidentally what keeps China as primarily an underdeveloped country, in which production is largely oriented toward exports, integrated into the world market as a subcontractor. This is what causes all of the developed countries to have a negative balance of trade with China. But it is also what guarantees comfortable profits to private and semi-private Chinese companies, and even greater ones to the Western and Japanese companies that subcontract their production to China or integrate Chinese products into their own, taking the largest part of the surplus value extracted from Chinese workers. Thus the pressure on wages remains strong. Besides this, retirement, healthcare, and education are only very partially socialized in China. All workers who can must therefore save a part of their earnings, which deprives the domestic market of even more outlets, although it does leave significant sums in the hands of the state by means of the banks where these savings are deposited. The government borrowed from these savings after 2008, mobilizing them to save the Chinese companies. Today it mobilizes them in what the Chinese leaders in 2013 called One Belt, One Road (OBR), before they changed the name to Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What we know in France as the "New Silk Road" is in reality a new wave of investments which are very expedient for Chinese companies, this time essentially in the form of loans to be repaid by the countries in which these projects are built.

The way the Chinese government describes it, the Belt and Road Initiative consists of promoting the construction or acquisition of infrastructure which would guarantee the flow of Chinese products to Europe and would secure the supply of raw materials, mostly coming from Africa. There are two main routes: the maritime routes through the Indian Ocean and reaching the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal, and the overland routes passing through Russia to Europe by train or truck. For the moment, it therefore consists of investment in railroads, ports, and roads. According to the governor of the People's Bank of China, the Chinese entities in charge of financing the BRI have already taken on 440 billion dollars in debt to expend on these projects since 2014. The Chinese government has made it understood that the total level of investment in Asia which it has judged necessary from now until 2049 "the symbolic date at which China is supposed to become the leading global power "is between four trillion and 26 trillion dollars. The 3,000 Chinese projects which make up the BRI account for a large share of this, between 900 billion and four trillion dollars.

Beyond the very political theme of the "Silk Road," the projects are in fact of a diverse and very opportunist nature. Some of them are simply a question of selling goods and services, such as the mass surveillance technologies for which 63 countries are clients, including Italy. What has drawn the attention of Western Europe has been the desire of Chinese companies to buy up or purchase shares in Western ports and airports which are considered strategic for the flow of goods. The French newspaper Les chos reported that a Chinese company purchased various degrees of ownership in shipping container terminals in the ports of Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, and Antwerp, in addition to Piraeus in Greece, and that another bought shares in 13 European container terminals, including Antwerp, Dunkirk, Le Havre, and Marseille. But the largest sums of money have been devoted to the construction of infrastructure. The arrangement is as follows: China lends to governments like those of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Venezuela, and Kenya what's needed to finance China's large-scale projects in their countries. In return, 100% of the construction contracts often go to Chinese companies, with a Chinese workforce.

As opposed to the traditional international lenders, Chinese establishments, which do not look too closely at the borrowers' capacity to repay, quickly advance loans to establishments. And so, many poor countries view China as an alternative to the Western countries. It charges them higher interest rates. But the populations will repay this debt, not government leaders. Djibouti's public debt has grown from 50% to 90% of its GDP, 77% of which is in Chinese hands. Pakistan has called on the IMF to pay its debts, and India has even offered one billion dollars to the Maldives to help it pay back its debt to China. In Kenya, the recent loan of 3.2 billion dollars for the construction of the Mombasa "Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway makes it almost impossible to repay the total of seven billion borrowed from the Export-Import Bank of China. In Sri Lanka, the construction of the Hambantota Port was financed with Chinese loans. The Sri Lankan government, unable to meet the terms of repayment, resigned itself to ceding the port and almost 15,000 acres of adjoining land to a Chinese company for 99 years, setting off a wave of protests in the country. The Hambantota Airport, built under the same conditions, became a prestigious but enormous liability, costing far more than it brought in. In Malaysia, the government renegotiated a contract with China for a railway line across the peninsula. In Myanmar (Burma) and Vietnam, identical railroad projects, each one costing tens of billions of dollars, are under discussion, in competition with similar projects proposed by Japan. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, built for about 50 billion dollars, bears close resemblance to development aid contingent on an immediate return on investment, providing work to Chinese companies. No Pakistani firm can swing a hammer in what has become a zone reserved for Chinese companies. The Gwadar Port itself was built by Chinese companies and managed by another Chinese company. Its extension, also built by Chinese companies, includes electric and fiber-optic connections, and highways linking China and Gwadar, an electric power plant, and special economic zones.

Heightened Competition

Despite all this, the new Silk Road cannot be reduced to simple economic considerations. It is also a matter of the political relations between China and the states of Southeast Asia, and more generally of China's place on the international chessboard. While the United States plays the card of protectionism and withdrawal, China, like all governments in the weaker position, calls for multilateralism, economic openness, non-discrimination, and free competition. Within the framework of its troubled relations with the United States, China is trying to draw politically closer to a certain number of its neighbors, and the billions of dollars spent on Silk Road are part of this attempt.

Its detractors "or its competitors "cast this as a threat to the sovereignty of the other states, as debt-trap diplomacy, or even as imperialism. The same article from Les chos (December 26, 2019) conveys the uneasiness of some milieus about Chinese influence in European ports, noting that Greece has taken political positions in favor of China on several occasions since a Chinese company became the owner of the Port of Piraeus. Greece is reproached for having vetoed a European Union statement in the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2017 criticizing China for human rights violations. Extending this line of reason to the growing weight of China in the ports of Belgium and the Netherlands, the journalist asks what would happen if the Chinese decided to redirect container traffic (representing one billion dollars per day flowing between China and Europe) from one port to the other, concluding: "This rise of Chinese power threatens to make the member states of the European Union more dependent on Beijing." Some are even calling Greece a new colony of China. It is not surprising that, in this world where the capitalist sharks are constantly at one another's throats, the emergence of a new competitor elicits such reactions.

The relations of force have also changed in Africa. In less than 20 years, China has become Africa's main economic partner. The economic value of trade between Africa and China reached 190 billion dollars in 2016 and is greater today than that of Africa's trade with India, France, and the United States combined. Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, Djibouti, and Morocco are participating in the new Silk Road. They are angling for Chinese investment in industrial parks, ports, airports, and highways, hoping that Chinese industries will relocate to Africa to take advantage of the lower labor costs there than in China. The African governments can also try to play off China against their traditional imperialist backers. U.S. imperialism has counter-attacked by denouncing the "debt trap" in which China has placed many African countries, with China alone holding about 20% of African state debt. China is accused of using debt "and it would not be the first to do so "as a means to influence the policies of governments with which they have entered into agreements.

In fact, China's investment in poor countries does not necessarily displease imperialism. That the Chinese billions might finance certain projects and guarantee a certain level of short-term stability, even at the expense of a few lost markets for Western corporations, does not mean these that countries would fall under Chinese influence. The Chinese billions will not pull the poor countries out of underdevelopment. The governments of these countries will make their populations pay to reimburse their debts. And it would take a lot more than a few billion dollars to make the imperialist powers lose their foothold in Africa.

Does China's influence over these countries make it an imperialist country? Certainly the relationship is not equal between China, which invests between 100 billion and 150 billion dollars in infrastructure beyond its borders every year, and the poor countries where it builds this infrastructure. But equal relations do not exist anywhere in the capitalist world. Although the Chinese state might use its financial weight to boost its influence as a great power, this does not make the country an imperialist power in the sense that Lenin used the term. Outside of the coastal zone that extends from Hong Kong to Beijing, it mostly remains an under-developed country whose economy is more or less integrated into the lower levels of global economy, as a supplier and subcontractor, whose major attraction is still its low wages. If what is meant by imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, the fruit of the most developed capitalism, then it is not precise to qualify China in such a way. This does not mean that it does not have relationships of domination over countries poorer than itself. Its size and centralized state allow it to concentrate a great deal of capital and to be much more powerful than a number of countries, despite its relative level of underdevelopment.

But Chinese authorities' current problem with the development of the Silk Road is trying to figure out how to attract other investors to finance these projects besides Chinese financial institutions, since these have only limited capacities. They are trying particularly hard to interest European capital, with one of their arguments, apart from the return on investment, being the interest for many industries in the improvement of the conditions of transport for goods between China and Europe, which would lower the cost of transportation and accelerate it.

Finally, from a military point of view, China is still dwarfed by the United States and its allies, unable to challenge the global relations of force and the imperialist division of the world. It has only one military base beyond its borders, in Djibouti, and it has had this for only a short while. Nevertheless, the new Silk Road projects, the increase of Chinese interests abroad, and a diaspora of 125 million Chinese, will doubtlessly allow the Chinese state to deploy troops abroad in the not-too-distant future. But we have not yet reached that point.

The Imperialist Policy of Containment

Certain people explain Trump's trade war as a late reaction on the part of the United States, which did not anticipate China's development and the growing role that it plays in the global economy. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The policy of containment toward China existed well before Trump. And containment, even using Trump's methods, does not mean that the U.S. is opposed to such a development, but only that it wants to control and channel it, since it makes substantial profits there and would like to keep doing so. China is not an underdeveloped country like the rest. Due to its centralized state inherited from the nationalist revolution of 1949, imperialism has to compromise and yield to some of its demands. From the 1990s until today, Western auto companies that want to sell cars in China have had to form joint ventures with Chinese firms, even if this meant conceding to them a part of Western auto companies' know-how and surplus value and thereby creating new competitors, some of which are in a position today to overtake the Western corporations (although China has announced that it wants to lift the restrictions on foreign auto companies in China by 2022). The same plan for development can be observed in aircraft manufacturing, with a slight lag in timing.

Overall, for the global bourgeoisie, China's development has opened up new markets, new sources of profits, and a young and poorly-paid working class to exploit. In the 1990s, the United States' policy therefore consisted of integrating China into international institutions, of making it follow U.S. norms in order to better channel it. This was the goal of the years of negotiations that led to China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. The Bush administration theorized the strategy of "containment," a double strategy consisting of rapproachment, engagement, and containment. Obama, for his part, took this up with his "pivot to Asia" strategy. It recognized China as a relatively powerful state, even while reinforcing U.S. influence in the region through partnerships with its traditional allies: Japan, Vietnam, India, etc. Again, this did not mean that it was preventing China's development, but that it was trying to control it as much as possible. One illustration of this policy was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was supposed to create a single free trade zone including the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, and Chile but excluding China. This agreement still exists today, but without the United States after Trump withdrew. Another aspect of containment is the military reinforcement of Japan, which has been underway for decades under U.S. auspices. The development of China and the cohesion of its state make it a serious competitor, whose regional ambitions can be seen in the construction of military bases in the South China Sea. U.S. policy consists on the one hand of commercial cooperation and economic integration, and on the other, of a desire to show dominance with its military might and trade warfare. The imperialist containment of China, which is in reality the path by which China has become fully reintegrated into the capitalist world, is a variable combination of these two policies.

There are fifty-five countries which have not joined the new Silk Road bodies where its projects and finances are negotiated. Among these are the main imperialist countries and the second-rank imperialisms (Japan, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, India, the member states of the European Union with the exception of Greece, Italy, and Portugal ). Apart from political reasons, these countries reserve their markets and investments for their own bourgeoisies. However, even within the imperialist countries, a number of bosses are salivating over the sums which China is offering. French President Emmanuel Macron, during his visit to China last November, said that the European Union was not opposed to the Silk Road, "on the condition that the circulation takes place in two directions," meaning that China should open its markets more.

The imperialist companies, which are often purchasers from Chinese firms, would profit from a future Silk Road. They would have the advantage that neither they nor their governments would be the ones paying for it, but the Chinese state. Apart from the economic gains that they may get from it, and besides the improvements in the transportation of Chinese goods which they require, they have every interest that China, which has long been integrated into the world economy, should not descend into chaos. By financially supporting their economy, the Chinese leaders are in reality supporting the entire capitalist system. And it is not only a matter of the profits of the world's corporations, of which a significant portion are linked to the Chinese state, but also of political stability.

A true recession would not be without social consequences. The Chinese working class is the largest one on the planet. Despite the police dictatorship, it knew how to fight for its wages, at least on a local level, several years ago. Massive layoffs stemming from the lack of profitable activity would open up a period of political uncertainty for the regime.

Worker militants in China must give the struggle against the Chinese bourgeoisie an internationalist character, drawing lessons from the past, affirming that, even at the level of a country like China, there are no long-term perspectives without the overthrow of imperialism. China, by reintegrating itself into the global capitalist system, has to endure its crises. For the moment, it is dealing with them by reaching into its funds and going into debt by exporting its capital. This is a policy which the Chinese state is making the Chinese proletariat pay for through exploitation, as well as the proletariat of the countries targeted for Chinese investment through debt. In this way, it is exporting the reasons for revolt.

Self-driving cars, automatic translation, image- and facial-recognition software, autonomous navigation systems: whether it inspires enthusiasm or anxiety, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be playing a larger and larger role in society. After the appearance of robots capable of replacing workers on assembly lines in the 1980s, so-called intelligent systems are today performing the labor of accountants, financial advisors, and even lawyers. Twenty years after the 1996 victory of the IBM computer Deep Blue over the chess champion Garry Kasparov, another machine, AlphaGo, this one belonging to Google, became the world champion of the board game Go, which is reputed to be very difficult to master.

However, rather than representing a considerable advance for humanity which allows for the extension of the human mind, AI appears to many as a threat which could destroy millions of jobs in the world in the immediate future. Some people are going so far as to predict the end of work. Others are worried about AI's increasing grip on our lives, and, behind it, the companies which have mastered it, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which are accused of surveilling the entire planet to collect, compile, and store the personal data of its inhabitants. But discussing a technology, no matter how high-performing, without discussing the society in which it appeared, the social conditions under which it has been implemented, and whom it benefits, does not make any sense. Behind the technological progress which allowed for the spectacular advances in AI, there is the exploitation of workers at the one end and the accumulation of profits at the other.

Artificial Intelligence: A Misuse of Language

The term "artificial intelligence" was invented in 1955 by John McCarthy, a professor of mathematics who worked on Turing machines, the predecessors of computers. Alan Turing (1912 "1954), a specialist in cryptography and algorithms, created the following rule in 1950 to decide whether a machine was intelligent: that it could pass for a human during a blind conversation with a real human.

The notion of artificial intelligence is an exaggeration, to say the least. It has nothing to do with human intelligence. It is a so-called "weak" intelligence, essentially able to sort and process an increasingly gigantic mass of data, in record time, with algorithms thought up by mathematicians. This is what the physicist Hubert Krivine calls "the irrational efficiency of data." AI is capable of predicting results better and much quicker than human intelligence, but it is not capable of understanding, and even less of innovating. It establishes correlations between phenomena without understanding the links of causation which connect them. It can lead to huge errors. And when the situation is unprecedented, the machine fails. For the same reasons, AI reproduces the biases and prejudices of the data used to train it. For example, Tay, an AI developed by Microsoft to exchange messages on social media, took less than a day before it started posting racist and Holocaust-denying tweets, feeding off of all of the messages that it found on the Web.

Although the human mind also processes and analyzes data, its ideas and reasoning, just like the feelings and intuitions that it experiences and expresses, are not the result of a simple accumulation of information. An individual's personal and social experiences contribute a great deal to the decisions they take. A support system for medical decisions can be quicker and more effective than a doctor for analyzing symptoms and medical imaging, but healing a patient cannot be reduced to analyzing their pathological data; this requires asking them questions and listening to them, in order to know their past history and their situation.

A Long and Laborious Progress

Since the 1950s and the early stages of AI, progress in computing took place over successive stages. The power of calculators has continued to increase. The invention of the transistor allowed for the miniaturization of electronic components. In 1971, Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor, which executed thousands of elementary operations in computer programs. But these advances in AI were followed by stagnation, since the promises made by its promoters (as early as 1958, certain people announced that "a digital computer will be the world's chess champion within ten years") were slow to be realized. There were many technical obstacles, notably the weak calculating power of the machines. As a result, public and private financing declined.

Between 1980 and 1987, AI experienced a new boom, with the establishment of "expert systems," or software programs capable of responding to questions, making a reasoning based on known facts and rules grouped together in data sets in a precise domain. In the same period, researchers explored new ways to make machines capable of sorting, classifying, choosing between two options, and even to improve their performances themselves. This was connectionism, which imitates the biological brain by recreating networks of artificial neurons, trained by algorithms to recognize images, contours, and faces. This method, called "deep learning," has been known for 30 years. But the power and calculating speed of computers have long remained too weak to produce convincing results.

This phase of AI's development in the 1980s coincided with a growth of new technologies which attracted masses of capital which were already looking for places to invest. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into this sector, until this bubble popped for the first time in 1987. Credit was cut off. AI disappeared from newspaper headlines.

It was not until the middle of the 2000s, with the increase in the capabilities of processors and then the development of the Internet, that it returned to center stage. To give an idea of this kind of calculating power, the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne recently acquired ROMEO, a computer capable of carrying out one quadrillion operations per second. The massive accumulation of data, or "big data," makes deep learning both possible and efficient for AI systems. This data collection has skyrocketed: every day, 2.5 quadrillion bytes of data are collected. Ninety percent of all available data in the world was collected over the past two years.

The Gold Mine of Big Data

The collection of the personal data of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of users, in order to ultimately transform it into advertisements and profits, has become a profession. This falls to the Internet operators Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the other GAFAM companies (to use the acronym made up of their names).

In 2001, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, declared: "If we did have a category, it would be personal information . The places you've seen. Communications . Sensors are really cheap . Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data . Everything you've ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable." In 2003, three Google computer scientists filed a patent entitled "Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising." Their invention involved "determining user profile information and using such determined user profile information for ad serving," or in other words, collecting data about the behavior of users in order to use it in targeted ads.

After it became a publicly-traded company in 2004, Google became one of the top five companies in terms of stock market capitalization in 2018. Its market capitalization is equivalent to Argentina's GDP. It is 4 or 5 times larger than that of a traditional company like Total, even though Google produces only services of limited value, and nothing material. Such a market value, which is largely virtual, is the result of speculation. Those who buy Google or Facebook stocks are anticipating that the price of these shares will rise, so that they can sell them and make a profit. These unbelievable market valuations also reflect the fact that the masses of disposable capital can find no outlet in other productive sectors. It is one of the signs of the incurable sickness of the capitalist economy. In addition, the stock market value of these companies can collapse just as quickly as it rose: Facebook's capitalization dropped by $120 billion in just one day, toward the end of 2018, after a giant breach of personal data was revealed.

That said, the financial power of the GAFAM companies allows them to form monopolies by buying up, sometimes at high prices, hundreds of other companies which specialize in the collection of personal data. Facebook bought the application WhatsApp in 2014 for the trifling sum of 19 billion dollars. Google bought Waze, a start-up that developed a GPS navigation app that competed with Google Maps, for 1.2 billion. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has bought up 230 companies since it was created. Besides Google, which owns Android and YouTube, Alphabet has developed a dozen subsidiaries which carry out research and development in healthcare, artificial intelligence, robotics, materials, transportation, cybersecurity, and even agriculture. Unsurprisingly, despite its motto of "Don't be evil," leaks have revealed that Google worked with the U.S. Army to develop killer drones. In 2018, workers at Microsoft and Amazon denounced their companies' sale of facial recognition software to the U.S. Border Patrol.

The market for connected devices continues to grow. There were 22 billion connected devices in the world in 2019, compared to 15 billion in 2016, and 40 billion expected in 2025. Once again, the main goal of companies in this sector is to collect data. Sleep Number, for example, which produced so-called intelligent beds, collects biometric data on the movements of sleepers, their positions, breathing, heart rate, and even the noises in their rooms. All of this information allows the company to create databases to train AI medical decision support systems.

Tapping an ever-growing mass of personal data allows digital technology companies to monetize it at high prices, either through targeted advertising or by developing various kinds of AI systems. Data collection and buying up promising start-ups are not the only source of enrichment for these firms. Like all capitalist companies, it is by exploiting workers all around the world, either directly or through subcontractors, that they enrich their shareholders.

The Slaves of Digital Tech

Behind the cool image of Californian geeks like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and the founders of the GAFAM companies, there is hidden exploitation. Although computer engineers are not the most exploited workers in the world, the blue collar workforce of Silicon Valley, and the cafeteria employees of Facebook and Alphabet, security guards, custodians, and drivers, have to hold down three jobs to survive. The digital technology industry is not virtual. It requires material support, computers, telephones, networks, storage facilities for ever-increasing amounts of data, etc. It needs thousands of tons of semiconductors and other electronic components, copper and other metals, rare-earth elements, coltan and tin, extracted from the mines of Congo, which are transformed or assembled in China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere, under horrific conditions. No progress in AI is possible without the very real and underpaid labor of workers around the world.

A report on the French television news show "Cash Investigation" on September 2019 shed light on another form of exploitation. This is that of the underpaid workers who train AI systems. Before software can recognize one particular face among all the others, or a meaningful pattern on an MRI scan, it is indispensable to subject it to "supervised" learning. This initial education falls on humans whose job it is to choose the figure they are supposed to identify out of thousands of photos, or to click in order to validate. Paid 1 to 12 cents per click, the most experienced people, working on their own computers for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, earn between $400 and $500 per month. In this work of teaching AI, someone can recognize images used to train drones how to kill without the person training them even knowing it. In the same vein, Facebook uses the labor of 15,000 "moderators," paid less than $900 a month, to look for hours at images or videos posted by users to remove those which Facebook deems violent, pornographic, or degrading. Apart from the criteria for censorship being imposed by Facebook, the moderators must constantly face often-serious psychological shock due to the unbearable images they have to see, all without the least bit of medical attention. The Internet allows the companies to distribute these unrewarding jobs all over the world. The tech giants subcontract them to multiple companies and wash their hands of the conditions under which this new category of workers, the slaves of the click farm, are exploited.

Advances in digital and computer technology, coupled with those of globalization, led to Amazon's success. But its algorithms and software serve primarily to organize the exploitation of workers. Amazon warehouse workers are under the constant surveillance of their scanners, the small portable device that tells them which goods to collect. This scanner not only tells them what work to do, but it also follows them around the warehouse, times each operation, and scolds them if they stay in the bathroom for too long. These exhausting and stressful work conditions accompany rock-bottom wages. At Amazon, AI has updated Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a parody of the work on auto factory assembly lines in the early 20th century, but it has not changed the exploitation.

Are Robots and AI Going to Replace Workers?

During his presidential campaign in 2017, Beno t Hamon called for the creation of a Universal Basic Income by invoking "the inevitable scarcity of work," caused by the development of AI and robots. The CGT union federation's monthly magazine, Ensemble, recently published an interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the director of the Institute for Research on Innovation and the author of a book called Work is Dead, Long Live Labor!, in which he writes: "Under the effect of total and generalized automation, workers will become a sort of residue from a past epoch. There will be, of course, jobs, because in certain sectors, there will continue to be a need for a proletarianized human workforce, but this will become exceptional." Stiegler's conclusion is that income must be disconnected from jobs, in order to distribute "resource allocations" or "contributive income." This sort of universal income would be paid by government bodies, meaning that it will come out of social service budgets, that is, the socialized part of the wealth produced by workers. But there can be no question of making the capitalists pay!

Stiegler cites various studies, such as that published in 2013 by two researchers at the University of Oxford, Frey and Osborne, claiming that 47% of U.S. jobs are at high risk, meaning that they are "potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two." Although it cannot be denied that automation eliminates jobs, these spectacular figures are challenged by other studies. A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published in 2016 indicates for its part that "while Frey and Osborne find that 47% of U.S. jobs are automatable, our corresponding figure is only 9%."

The jobs eliminated by the introduction of robots have long been those held by industrial and retail workers. Even in China, the workshop of the world, with low-paid workers, the government in 2015 launched a plan called Robots 2025 in order to boost automation in its factories. Questioned in January 2018 by a journalist from the French television show "Envoy&eacute Special," the director of an enormous factory in southern China belonging to Hisense, a subcontractor for Hitachi, Sharp, and Whirlpool, explained that he invested in a robot as soon as its cost fell below that of two years of a workers' wage. In three years, this factory cut 3,000 out of its 8,000 jobs. But one should not lose sight of the forest for the trees: all over the world, even in a factory with many robots, the hard and unrewarding tasks requiring little training continue to be performed by underpaid workers. This is in essence what the director of a digital technology research institute told the newspaper Les chos: "The lower the cost of labor, the less interest there is in replacing the worker." Nevertheless, the use of intelligent software eliminates the jobs of accountants, financial analysts, and bank and insurance employees. These are skilled and relatively well-paid jobs.

However, although digitization and automation do eliminate jobs, how many have been cut due to plant closures following corporate restructuring, to outsourcing, and to gains in productivity, without the introduction of either robots or intelligent software? The main cause of job cuts is not automation but the aggravation of exploitation in an economy in crisis and stagnation. The tens of thousands of jobs now being eliminated by the European banks are being cut just as much, if not more, because of economic slowdown and their bosses' uncertainty about the future as because of the effects of AI.

Using machines to produce more quickly and at a larger scale, to lower production time, has characterized capitalism since its origins. Robots and systems equipped with AI are just perfected machines. In every period, the introduction of new machines has taken place on the backs of workers. Some were thrown out of work, while those hired to run the new installations were even more exploited than before. As the system extended and developed, new jobs were created. What characterizes the current period, much more than the performance of so-called intelligent machines, is the stagnation of the economy and the capitalists' inability to develop its productive forces, and even to update those already in use, due to a lack of potential markets.

As long as the means of production belong to private capitalists, the gains in productivity allowed by machines "intelligent or not "will not benefit workers, and the inventions that could reduce the general hardship of labor will only heighten exploitation for certain workers. Capitalism has always consisted of the marriage of extraordinary scientific and technical prowess with the worst exploitation of human beings.

For all that, no more than the introduction of machines in the nineteenth century did not stop workers from organizing to defend themselves collectively, the introduction of robots and AI in the twenty-first century will not put an end to the class struggle. Although Luc Ferry, the former French education minister under Sarkozy, said during a symposium about automation in 2018: "A robot doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't join the CGT, and doesn't go on strike. The bosses dream of it," he may be disappointed. The workers who hold the underpaid jobs created by digital technology, like those who slave away in workshops beside robots, or those who build them, continue to create surplus value, and therefore profits for the bosses. They are indispensable for the functioning of the economy, and this gives them a central role to change society.

The global economy has been ripe for socialism for over a century. All of the elements for planning exist, but the big companies use them for their own profit, without getting rid of the competition between them or the waste that this creates. Digital technology and artificial intelligence are not only the means to improve human life, to eliminate difficult, dangerous, or tedious work, and to improve human abilities. They are also tools for planning which Marx and Lenin could not even have imagined. They offer powerful instruments for humanity to take stock of the resources, energy, and needs of everyone, at both a local and a global level. They could allow us to organize the production, transportation, and distribution of the goods necessary to everyone in a rational and planned way, all while preserving the planet and above all reducing the labor of each human being. Combined with the capacities for production which already exist, they would allow us to reduce productive labor to a minimum, all while permitting each human being to make their contribution to the functioning of society. Marx's slogan, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," could finally become a reality.

But none of this is possible unless the working class "all categories together "takes the control of the means of production out of the hands of the big bourgeoisie.